RSSApple: 1 Million Tunes Sold in First Week
By Nate Mook | Published May 5, 2003, 11:46 PM
Surpassing even its own expectations, Apple announced that over one million songs have been sold via the iTunes Music Store since its launch one week ago. More than half the songs were purchased as part of complete albums, a sign Apple says proves that selling individual tracks online will not destroy album sales.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs boasted about the instant success, saying Apple had "broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world."
Currently featuring a library of 200,000 songs, the iTunes Music Store will receive 3,200 more tracks on May 6, including new album releases from Jack Johnson and Andrea Bocelli. An exclusive song and video from Coldplay will be added as part of the band's Featured Artist page, along with Alanis Morissette and her catalog of music.
Backing up the positive response from iTunes Music Store customers, Apple says it has received orders for 110,000 third-generation iPods, which went on sale May 2.
The company's major label partners that were essential in launching the iTunes Music Store were supportive of the news.
"Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the Internet," said Roger Ames, CEO of Warner Music Group.
Here's something I have not been able to do with their iTunes music store...browse the music without having to buy a Mac/iPod first.
How would I know if I would be interested in the list of artists they have available? Buy a Mac AND an iPod to find out?
Unless they have super-secret hidden link on their iTunes web site...
I somehow don't think the million songs will be repeat buyers. I don't buy CDs every week. Granted there will be some repeat buyers and some new buyers, but we'll see if the sales keep up.
Also, I wonder if their count of one million songs is using RIAA's method of counting (remember the whole counting thing with the CD Writer drives?) So, usually there are around 3 good songs in a 12 song CD. And since the buyers now pick only the ones they want, each song is counted as 4 being sold? :)
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|so they sold a million songs in a week.
so how much do they keep?
some money goes to the credit card compainies.
most goes to the label
a few pennies goes to the artist.
i can't imagine they are making more then 10 cents on the dollar.
$100,000 isn't that impressive.
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|So, $100,000 according to your math... for a WEEK. That's nothing to complain about, especially assuming that the number of sales will go up as more people sign on to the service. Let's assume they dont...
$100,000 x 52 weeks = $5,200,000 in revenue for a year, not too shabby either. Are you saying you would turn it down?
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|Apple is getting shafted. 5 million dollars in profit a year is great but when it's on 50 million dollars of sales it doesn't look so great especialy since they don't own what they are selling. When you own what you are selling the money doesn't leave the company as quick.
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|"Backing up the positive response from iTunes Music Store customers, Apple says it has received orders for 110,000 third-generation iPods, which went on sale May 2."
They don't look too inept to me! Apple is mainly a hardware company and that's where the money is for them. FYI, I am not a Mac user, merely an interested observer.
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|The hype should die down in a couple of weeks.
Why pay for less than half the quality of a CD? Your better off downloading an album for free from eDonkey or any other sharing app at a reasonable 192Kps. Listen to it and decide if I want to buy it. Why pay for an album or song only to discover that its not so good after all?
Last thing labels want is for you to try before you buy, a one hit wonder should be selling lots of albums right?
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|er ... they're encoding to AAC file format, directly from the original digtal source, they aren't ripping the songs from CD's.
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|This is why Apple offers 30-second previews of songs, to get an idea of whether you'd like it or not before you buy.
Plus, the majority of people don't really have the time or patience to deal with P2P services like eDonkey or KaZaA. And most people are law abiding citizens who will pay if the service is good. It's only a victimless crime until the RIAA comes knocking at your door asking for $20,000 in damages.
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|err.
OK, so you take the best possible quality source and encode it to a paltry 128kbps AAC? Woot!
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|I haven't tried it yet, but it sure sounds interesting, not talking about any other stuff, but just interesting... Can anyone who used it post a comment?
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|I've personally purchased 38 songs thus far and have been extremely impressed. Quality is great, and you can't beat the convenience (being able to order music instantly from within your audio player). I've mostly picked up Exclusive tracks, which in my opinion is the best part about digital audio on the Web (you could get almost 5 variants -- acoustic, live, remixed, etc. -- of every song on AudioGalaxy when it was alive), and older stuff that is almost impossible to find except at Tower Records for $20. Overall, it's a great service and I find myself spending time every day looking for new music or searching for something a friend recommended. The 30 second preview is nice, but would be even better longer (if only bandwidth was free). Here's to hoping iTunes for Windows is completed soon!
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|Are they working on a Windows version? I went there after reading this article to possibly buy some music, but to my surprise, it's only available to Mac users. The surprise being that all that music was sold to only Mac users. They'd probably sell much more if more people (Windows people) could access the service.
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|Indeed they are. Read the following article for more information:
http://www.betanews.com/...cle.php3?sid=1051741300
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