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Zune Sales Not So Bad After All
pyrbrand writes "Despite the iFanboy jabber that Zune sales were horrific, CNN has a story to the contrary. Turns out Zune was the #2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales. Not a bad start for the challenger to the iPod throne. As others have pointed out the Amazon sales rank may have been thrown off by Zune sales being divided between the three colors."
Aren't the sales for ipods also divided between all the various models and colors?
There is a sucker born every minute ...
That a RECORD PLAYER is over a dozen places higher in the list than the top selling Zune.
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
That's the nature of statistics.
And fanboys.
I am a touch surprised that it beat out sandisk, since sandisk sells more at amazon.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The situation with Zune/iPod is no different than the situation with Office/ODF. *More* real choices = better for the consumer and lower prices by all! We need a serious challenger to Apple for no other reason than to force them to cross that final frontier - playing nicely with everyone else (i.e., not forcing their product chain down our throats with restrictive DRM). Once their current feature-set become commoditized, they'll have no choice but to add interoperability as a feature to differentiate themselves.
They haven't accounted for returns though ;-)
IMO, it isn't exactly fair to compare "Zune" with "ALL of the iPods".
The Zune targets one small slice of territory that Apple has already staked out.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Personally I believe the WiFi feature will be a difference-maker, but as currently implemented on the Zune it isn't very enticing. I expect MS to come out with a software update in 6 months or so that will dramatically improve the wireless functionality. I used the early Smartphones and they had similar rough edges - they were clunky and missing many "obvious" features. But MS kept plugging along and now they have a very competitive phone operating system. With their resources and long-term view I figure they will ultimately make the Zune a formidible competitor to the iPod franchise. We also should remember that it's still early yet in this game. Portable media players only last about 3-4 years, so we haven't even really seen the first big replacement wave yet.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
And I hate to reply to myself here, but I can't help but wonder if Apple is making the same mistake they made before - creating a closed-technology stack for short term profits. I can't really argue against Jobs for doing this (he's a billionaire after all), but as was proven in the old days of the Apple, eventually the competition catches up and cuts you off at the knees. There's something to be said for playing nicely with everyone.
"Despite the iFanboy jabber"
Did anybody else stop reading after that?
Disagree with me? Tell me why, but follow these rules.
Since the numbers are from big box retailers only, they are pretty skewed. No online (no store.apple.com, Amazon, etc), probably not Apple's retail stores either.
Considering the initial curiosity factor and Microsoft employees, I would have expected the initial uptake to have a bigger impact than even this. If they are starting at this low of a baseline... lets just say Creative and SanDisk probably don't have much to worry about.
They can do whatever they want. I won't buy it, and it doesn't harm me
" shenanigans are setting "precedent". Now, everyone else (Apple) is "encouraged" to do the same...
Wait, huh? Oh crap, I forgot. Microsoft's "we'll-pay-you-an-'all-our-users-are-thieves'-tax
Damn...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Certainly there was some base of people who wanted (some later to be usefull) wi-fi plus an FM receiver plus video at that price point. Microsoft advertized enough that these people knew about it, so they got it when they first had their chance. That group of people, however, is not particularly related to digital music player buyers as a whole, as it is only continuous purchases over its life span that will be untimately meaningful. Furthermore, this week was singled out from the Zune being the only new thing on the market. That they only got second when they were the only new thing around--for over a month or something?--is actually rather sad.
A more representative week would be, say, the week after Thanksgiving, which shows a lot about retail buying habits (and is a significant percentage of such).
In all seriousness that's actually a great gift for someone with an old record collection which is pretty much everyone over 40 or 50.
Work Safe Porn
I suppose if your talking DRM only then you are correct. Apple holds a monopoly on the idiocy of DRM in digital music stores and players. But the last thing we need is another player with competing DRM, we need to get rid of DRM altogether.
The market for MP3 players is highly competitive, Zune brings nothing new to the market and is simply a Microsoft me too product. It will make no difference in fair use for music consumers and in fact brings a BS royalty tax on every device consumers purchase. Now even if you don't buy the corporate backed music you still have to pay for it in the form of a royalty to the coroprate music industry on every Zune sold. Thanks Microsoft.
burnin
Or... let me think... DJ's with thousands of albums that they want to convert to CD or MP3 for DJing instead?
It's a new gadget and it was hyped to the extreme. Obviously it';s going to sell well. The sad thing is the new product buzz didn't stop people from buying "old" iPods at a FAR larger rate. And the study doesn't even include iPods sold in Apple Stores, which is a huge bias. Look at where the Zune is now. It's nowhere. Nice try, but the numbers don't mean a damn thing unless they're sustainable.
Normally I would agree with you .. it would be nice for Apple to have pressure to do new better stuff with their ipod besides make it smaller and redder. But, and this pains me to say, in this case Apple seems to have actually done good with their dictatorship (it pains me to say dictatorships are good, rather than saying something bad about Apple).
./ stories, but because M$ caved into Universal, it's now causing issues for Apple. Apple was the only company willing to fight for a flat rate for the consumer and make it work. If it weren't for Apple's iTunes store, buying music onlne would still really suck.
See the related
And no, I don't like DRM'd crap, but I do like our environment better, and don't care to pollute it with more CDs that I'm just going to rip. Would I rather just because to get plain MP3s. Yeah, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon. From personal experience, Apple's DRM is pretty decent, and only got in the way once, where I had to deauthorize all my computers.
So in this case, competition actually isn't looking good for consumer's rights, primarily because most consumers buying these things aren't well informed.
Any DJ that would take a tremendous leap backward like this should be stripped of his PA and his pseudonym. It would be like Eric Clapton trading his guitars for a copy of Guitar Hero 2.
The future isn't here until I can type "car keys" into Google and have it say "You left them in your pants last night."
If you want a decent player, get a Cowon A2, X5, etc. They use Linux and play it all.
Oh please. If I'm buying a music player, there are a few considerations:
Does it sound good?
Is it easy to navigate?
Can I transfer music realtively easily?
I don't give a tiny rats ass whether it's Linux or MS or Apple or some other dude. I don't care. And the unwashed masses buying these things care even less than I do.
Apple's music store has DRM, but there isn't any anywhere else. The Zune adds DRM to your un-DRMed songs for you. Plus the music industry royalty, that they're now pressuring Apple to add. Seems like a definite step backward.
...except TFA (from money.cnn.com) doesn't say "iFanboy" anywhere. The article itself is unbiased, if you cared to read it.
The first week, the Zune was indeed in the top ten at Amazon - it's only after that the sales dropped like a rock to the current place below 50th. So what the article is saying is not inconsistent with what was observed from Amazon sales rank.
So the article is only telling us what we already knew from reviewing Amazon sales - sales were good the first week, when the media blitz worked but before word of mouth cooled opinion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"#2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales" Its only the first week. Products usually post their strongest numbers when they launch. Let's see their numbers after 1 year of sales.
How you can compare the DRM infested Zune with ODF is beyond me. One is an open document specification that could enable people on different OS, hardware, or software to exchange files, the other is a closed platform music player with DRM so restrictive that your entire music collection can auto-delete itself because you forgot to pay your monthly bill...
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Its just that Microsoft had to trample over the battered bodies of their "plays for sure" partners to get there.
Yeah...
As long as it comes with BASH. Navigation made simple and intuitive.
After the first week boost, the Zune feel rapidly while the Sandisk stayed where it was - right in the middle of the iPods in the top fifteen or so MP3 players.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've seen a lot of Zune ads. None of them mention Microsoft at all. Anywhere. I wonder if this is MS admitting that they have no mindshare. Or maybe the "cool" factor doesn't go with their corporate logo.
You won't comment on this "totally unbiased" article, but you have no problem commenting on another "totally unbiased" article called "How iPods Took Over the World", huh? Why is that?
Apple has had some good competition already - the Archos players, the Creative stuff and the Sandisk. Each of those has brought something interesting to the table and made Apple keep advancing.
What has the Zune brought that's new? WiFi sharing that is so limited it does not exist, and the standard now that EVERY MP3 player going forward will be pressed by labels to pay a small fee just for the right to exist! Has the existance of the Zune REALLY improved the market in any way?
Competition is great, but Microsoft left the door wide open for the RIAA to get a foot in. For that alone they deserve endless scorn and market failure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft has enough employees who will have to buy their crappy product (to show company spirit) to stay in the top 3 for at least another two weeks. And then it's over.
Apple wasn't the first out to market with an mp3 player but unlike MS they did their research. Every new generation of Ipod gets better its interface is extremely easy to learn and use. Itunes is not bad and I went out and bought 5th gen video ipod just because of how easy it is to subscribe to podcasts (G4, SG, etc) and ease of keeping everything in sync.
I purchased the very second mp3 player that became commercially available in USA - Diamond Rio PMP300 in 1998 and Creative Lab's Nomad ][ a little bit later. Both were not great and the first suffered from slow transfer speed and second from just-ok interface but at least both products worked out of the box and I didn't have to wait a year for some feature that was promised to start working - NO wireless sync with PC(even my old motorola e680i phone can do this via bluetooth), crippled song "sharing" and no Vista support YET even though Vista is shipping in a month to PC manufacturers. Very rushed - feels like a pot-luck dinner.
Finally, I think MS blew it because they are a software company first and they couldn't even write (OR STEAL) something decent. They only had 10 year to sit there and watch everyone else do it. I feel bad for Toshiba, they didn't really need this.
I guess they didn't learn from Panasonic's 3DO fiasco where Trip Hawking tricked them into giving his company $100 million to blow on a video game system that didn't sell well.
"All I got for Xmas was a Brown Zune"
I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to the other kind of DJ.
You know, the "throw your hands in the air" type who mixes, scratches, and crossfades?
Not the one who spun "The Chicken Dance" at your cousin's wedding.
There is a very simple reason to both avoid purchase of the Zune and pray to 42 that it fails. For every Zune sale, the record industry gets a cut. If you buy a Zune, you are propping up the RIAA. You are essentially paying a tax that assumes you are guilty of copyright infringement before you've even committed it (and of course you could get still get sued by the RIAA even after paying the absurd tax). This should sound familiar to Canadians.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
...but not the way you were thinking. In fact what the WiFi gets you besides the ability to music in a very limited manner, is the "WiFi Sizzle" - a delightful crackle overlaid on your music while WiFi is enabled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let us all help the band play merrily along while the Zune ship slides into the murky waters of consumer disinterest, by labeling this and all subsequent Zune trolling articles with the flag "zuneral".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While I agree in principle with you, iPods are designed to be used as portable audio players. Being able to use them as an external drive is a bonus, not an advertised feature. On the other hand, the blank CD tax in Canada is truly unfair, because blank media is designed to be used in a large number of ways, NOT just audio. I think of the last 200 CDs I've burned, about five were audio (and MP3 CDs at that, which is a data disc on a technicality). Since finding that old cassette adapter that I plug into my iPod, I've had no need for audio CDs.
And for the sake of Devil's Advocate, you should (by the industry's logic) be forced to pay a royalty for using your iPod as a portable drive for your camera. Not for the music, but for the painfully high chance that you've snapped a shot that included something copyrighted... basically anything with a backdrop other than a landscape (ads plastered everywhere, any branded products, etc). Just like the painfully high chance you infringed copyright of (not stole... they still have their copy!) music, right?
Don't get me wrong. The idea sucks, and is downright offensive to almost everyone who actually buys music. But a piracy tax on iPods DOES make more sense than blank media taxes, simply due to intended use. As far as I'm concerned, Apple shouldn't have to pay them a cent as long as they keep the "Don't steal music." sticker on the front (nor should any other brand). As far as I'm concerned, such a tax legitimizes piracy - a Slashdot post I read earlier today indicated that this logic held up in Canadian court. I'd be all for the idea if I didn't know that the logic couldn't possibly hold up in a court system as screwed up as our (US) own.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Microsoft didn't "cave" to Universal. To "cave" implies resistance. Microsoft and Universal have always been on the same page.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In the early 90's I decided to join the tech audio revolution and I got rid of an eclectic lp collection that spanned more than a thirty year period. Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Cannonball Adderley, Leonard Kwan, Carlos Montoya, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and on and on.
No cd ever sounded as good to me as an lp and it makes me sick that I was so stupid as to part with them. I'll bet the guy that bought them is still pretty happy with his purchase though.
"i.e., not forcing their product chain down our throats with restrictive DRM)"
As other have pointed out one billion times, Apple doesn't force restrictive DRM on anyone. You can use your iTunes and iPod without one illegal, low quality, DRM'd file.
Not one. I can buy 1000 CD's from my local music store, RIP them, and have iTunes synch them to my iPod und DRM'd, legally (unlike the Zune's software counterpart).
If you wish to purchase songs legally for download via the internets, iTunes not only has a far more sane DRM scheme than almost all others, but I've never fealt restricted by it. Not one bit. I can burn CD's, copy them to other computers (5 a year... do you need to reasonably have them on more?), and can even RIP those burned CD's to produce non-DRM'd iTunes purchased songs.
I have no idea why people still claim this.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I'm talking about electronica DJs. Many still use vinyl, but are moving to CD's (CDJ Equipment) and some laptops (eugh).
I agree completely. It's kind of weird to thing of one company so completely dominating a market to be a good thing, but Apple hasn't abused us consumers the way we have come to expect of monopolies (or near-monopoly, in this case.)
Despite the lack of real competition, Apple has come out with new, improved models every year or so, expanded their product line to include cheaper models, and appeased the RIAA with a DRM on purchased songs that is not nearly as offensive as it could have been. All of the songs that I ripped from CDs, cassettes, and even vinyl, are in MP3 and DRM-free, and thus work on my iPod without any issues at all. The Zune, on the other hand, imposes a DRM on any file that gets loaded onto it. It could be an MP3 voice recording of a lecture that I gave, and thus solely MY intellectual property, and the Zune would still put an oppressive DRM on it for me.
On the other hand, the DRM on the songs that I downloaded from the iTunes store has never given me any issues. I didn't even realize they were DRMed until the guy at the Apple Store had me me deauthorize my computer before they would send it to the repair depot to replace the logic board. There's nothing more the RIAA would like more than an overly protective DRM force a consumer to buy a song twice... more money for them. But the Apple guys went out of their way to make sure that I had my music backed up elsewhere and my computer deauthorized so that I wouldn't have to pay for the songs a second time.
WindowsME aka WindowsMErde
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
the Amazon sales rank may have been thrown off by Zune sales being divided between the three colors.
You mean, like the iPod sales being divided between 14 or so models and colours?
Yes, the zune's initial week was fairly good. If you read just a little further on any mainstream press article, however, you'll see that the total failure was attributed not to first week sales, but to the fact that after all the fanboys and easy-to-fool idiots had bought one, sales dropped to almost nothing. The same Amazon sales rank that was #2 in the first week was #13 in the second if I recall correctly. Right now, it's #60, which definitely qualifies as "abysmal". The 4 GB silver nano, the lowest listed iPod model, beats it jumping on one leg with both hands tied behind its back (rank #15).
Sorry, MS fanboy, zune is as dead as a doornail and twice as hard to sell.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That article is hilarious. His first comment, "I still think it's an excellent portable media player." Then he goes on to list 10 doozies that microsoft needs to fix, actually what he's saying is, "I need portable media player produced by someone else." But I don't think he's figured that part out yet.
Also, how you can think Bamafan77 was comparing the Zune with ODF is beyond me. Your reading comprehension is very poor. Bamafan77 was comparing "Zune/iPod" with "Office/ODF" and his obvious point was "having choices." ODF and Zune will hopefully bring real alternatives to the dominant Office format and dominant iPod DRM.
My day job has me working retail, and I'll have to say that the iPods are running circles around the zune. We've sold 1 zune since the first shipment came in and we've already gone through about 40 ipods. I DON'T think Apple has anything to worry about.
"Zune is basically going to pretty much kill off all non-iPod players"
5 1549011/ref=pd_ts_pg_1/002-1687820-0216019?ie=UTF8 &pg=1
Not likely. Despite the title of the article, go take a look at the actual sales rank of the MS-Zune players on Amazon. The black is #52, the rest are significantly below that (greater than 250). Sansa has a player in the top 10, and a 2nd one at number 11, Creative has a player in the top 20, Sansa has a couple more scattered around the top 100. Apple has players everywhere on this list. Everywhere.
Again, I urge folks to look at the actual Amazon site instead of reading articles about Amazon.
Here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/
Keeping in mind that the holiday is when a big portion of sales, unless MS drops the Zune prices down by about 40%, this this is headed for the bottom pretty quickly. While that's obviously my opinion, all you need to do is watch the trend of the player. Just the novelty of this thing should have kept it in the top 10 until xmas. But to fall to #52 in just a week is pretty amazing.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
How many people do you think falls into the category of being over 50 but not 40?
If I thought a piracy tax would end all other forms of litigation and DRM from the RIAA,
I might give it some credence, but we all know it won't. They want it both ways.
Maxim
Because I work at RadioShack and none of the 30 stores in our district have sold any. Where as my tiny store has sold over ten iPods in the past week. I live in Madison just off State Street, and EB Games on State (The Biggest shopping street in Madison) hasn't even sold any to any of the music crazy wealthy students yet.
apple has consistently been dropping the prices of their ipods. i think a more likely scenario for the price drop was to leave space at the top for a "super ipod" or the true video ipod that's been rumored. they dropped the price of their whole "full-size" line rather than just the 30Gb which indicates a larger plan than just undercutting the zune (which had yet to announce a price). it might be possible that they did it to drive the price of the zune down as one factor of their decision, but it's certainly not as clear as the grandparent implies.