p2pnet - rss feed: Apple’s 250 million in sales
p2pnet.net News:- Apple boasts it’s sold 250 million downloads since it started iTunes in 2003.
“The iTunes Music Store is now available in fifteen countries, which together represent more than 70 percent of the global music market,” it crows.
This will be played up massively by the mainstream media, suggesting there’s a significant online music market with people falling over themselves to buy.
However, compared to what’s happening on the p2p networks – the only true gauge of online music activity - the corporate sales combined are infinitismal.
Contrary to what the Apple post deliberately implies, by far the vast majority of online music lovers are definitely not buying. Rather, they’re sharing their music for free because the cartel members, EMI (UK), UMG (France), Warner (US) and Sony BMG (Japan, Germany) refuse to open their vast catalogues to online music lovers, preferring to offer severely limited numbers of tracks at grossly inflated prices.
Apple’s 250 million doesn’t even register against what’s really happening online where a handful, relatively speaking, of people blindly fork out a minimum of a dollar US per download, depending on where they are. For their money, they get lossy, compressed tracks which aren’t worth more than a few cents each and which are only good for mp3 players and the like. CDs and DVDs are for high quality listening. But not at $15 or $20 a pop, with only one or two decent songs.
Apple, though, isn’t complaining. Its iTunes sales are loss-leaders to encourage Apple devotees and other less religiously inclined punters to buy iPods.
Thank heavens for moms and dads and Christmas and birthdays and graduation presents and ….
But neither Apple nor anyone else is getting rich from online corporate music sales, despite the vast amounts of money being blown on PR and promotions, and the millions of gallons of ink and billions of bytes generated by the ever-faithful main stream media.
Not that there won’t eventually be a rich and profitable online music market.
Customers with a choice
Online music lovers who currently get their fixes from the various commercial and non-commercial p2p applications are slowly forcing Big Music (and the movie studios) to configure their business models to account for the fact this is the digital 21st century, not the physical 1970s where ‘consumers’ bought what they were told, paying through the nose as they did so, because they had no other choice.
It’s 2005 and people have become customers with a choice, again - thanks to p2p and the Net and the growing numbers of independent labels and artists who are turning CyberSpace into their space.
Netsters can, and do, make their views and wants felt – powerfully. The entertainment industry is trying to counter this by calling the men, women and children who share online ‘criminals’ while entertainment industry lawyers try to sue them into buying ‘product’.
But no amount of heavyweight bullying will turn the clock back.
In December, the average number of simultaneous users on the p2p networks at any given moment was 5,500,314 in the US, and 7,582,248 globally, says p2p research firm Big Champagne.
The number of people logged on to p2p file sharing networks simultaneously grew to nearly 10 million in April 2004, a 30% increase from the same period a year earlier, says an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study.
Well over a billion music files move computer-to-computer every month, says Big Champagne.
Looking at those kinds of statistics, it’s hard to understand why the corporate entertainment industry isn’t using the innovative man-power it undoubtedly has at its disposal to tap this gold-mine, with all the savings in overhead, legal fees, physical production costs, and so on, digital trading would bring.
Nonetheless, the entertainment industry will lie and twist and fight tooth-and-nail to continue marketing and selling product in the old ways.
Peer-to-peer sharing of alls types is, however, here to stay and to survive, the labels and studios will not only be forced to compete, instead of dominating, they’ll also have to provide value for money.
And in the process, they’ll do as well as they’ve always done.
Something you think we should know about? tips[at]p2pnet.net
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See:-
250 million - iTunes Music Store Downloads Top a Quarter Billion Songs, Apple, January 24, 2005
corporate sales combined - The Digital Music Revolution, p2pnet, January 19, 2005
study - P2p file sharing is increasing, p2pnet, January 4, 2005
January 24th, 2005 at 11:37 pm
Apple is rotten to the core…
as is evidenced by their recent behaviour on first amendment rights, role of RIAA sycophant, ant-competitive behaviour (drm bs), poor customer care (ipod bats, laptop replacements) etc etc etc
January 24th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
yep, took 4 times and hours on the phone and threats to the BBB before I finally had my board replaced in my powerbook.
Up until they issued a general recall on that particualr part (which is how I ended up getting it replaced, it apparently was my fault that the manufacturing process was flawed.
~MM
January 25th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
Like I’ve said a dozen times…a computer is a computer is a computer. An Apple can suck just as much as a PC. The operating systems suck even more, carrying around more baggage than my Aunt Harriet.
Customer service is lovely until something goes wrong or you want to return something…..then suddenly you’re in the middle of Death Valley and your computer is the now dead horse that got you there.
January 26th, 2005 at 12:20 am
too bad the mainstream press has no one this outspoken willing to tell it like it really is.
January 26th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
250 million records should produce about 18 million dollars to songwriters.
Surelty the songwriters and the performers are not getting their share of royalties since no one audits/trails of this money, as is usual in the dark room accounting of the music industry profiteers.
And how does Apple get the royalty money to the songwriters in other countries? As an industry Insider I know there is no mechanism in place to do that.
January 27th, 2005 at 9:25 pm
Itunes makes no profit.
More of an ipod marketing vehicle.
January 27th, 2005 at 10:03 pm
Songwriter royalties are almost never paid from profits. Royalties are paid to songwriter according to the terms in whatever contract or license the songwriter signed. Usually the songwriter expects so many cents for each unit sold.
I have never heard of a songwriter who licenses to get a share of the profits. If anyone did it he/she would risk getting gettig shortchanged since record company books are frequently cooked so that no one shares in the profits. Even so, songwriters are almost always shorchanged because unit sales are unauditable in the current scheme of things and record companies may cook the sales figures and if not the record producer, the music publishing in the middle.
That is why so many performers get nothing from their recording and so many sonwriters get almost nothing. Cooked books.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com