iTunes 25 million under target
p2pnet.net News:- Apple’s iTunes target of 100 million tracks sold by the end of April will fall well short, says ceo Steve Jobs.
Quoted in a Wall Street Journal interview, he now expects to sell between 70 and 75 million tunes by then, a BBC report says here.
When Apple launched iTunes a year ago, it was MAC-only. Six months later, it had been revamped to include Windows users and last week the mainstream media was beside itself when Jobs announced he’d sold 50 million tracks.
P2pnet wondered then, and wonders now, what the fuss was all about.
Part of the reason, said Jobs, was slower than expected downloads from an iTunes-Pepsi promotion.
That’s the disgusting ad campaign where teenagers who’d been sued by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) are portrayed as criminals in a smirky I fought the law, but the law won TV spot.
P2pnet was one of the few publications to criticize the promo. Interestingly, Pepsi ultimately changed the ad, taking out some of the kids and removing the overlays referring to them as the “Accused,” etc. Apple also had a pic of one of the girls in the lead spot on their iTunes site. It’s now gone.
But we digress.
When you’re talking about music downloads, the numbers represented by the corporate sites don’t even make a blip on the bottom line radar.
At any given moment, four million simultaneous users are logged on to p2p networks and as many as a BILLION (1,000,000,000) files are shared every month, says Eric Garland, ceo of Big Champagne.
Think about it.
And p2p file sharers have millions and millions of music files from cultures and artists all around the world to choose from, not just the same old, lame old 250,000 – 500,000 tracks offered by the Big Music-backed online stores at a dollar a download.
On the other hand, maybe that’s not so bad – from the point of view of the Big Five labels, that is.
With a whole slew of glitzy corporate music stores selling identical Big Music ‘product’ at identical Big Music prices, Big Music can’t loose.
As for Apple, Jobs has been saying almost since Day One that iTunes is a loss leader.
The Beeb story says Apple faces increasing competition from others such as Napster II, which are trying to “capitalise on the appetite for online music”.
That’s not exactly the case, though. Napster II, owned by Roxio, is having serious problems, despite the fact it has the Big Five labels right behind it, pushing it into American universities as a record industry sales outlet.
But no doubt we’ll continue to see reports extolling the virtues of the virtueless online corporate stores.
