iTunes in decline
p2pnet.net News:- The mainstream media are in a tizzy again. Has iTunes, Apple’s customer-funded iPod online loader, peaked? Or hasn’t it?
iTunes sales, “dropped off dramatically in the first six months of 2006, according to a recent survey,” says Reuters, going on:
“Since January, the number of monthly iTunes transactions has declined 58%, while the average size per purchase declined by 17%, leading to a 65% overall drop in monthly iTunes revenue, U.S. market research group Forrester Research Inc. said in a report on the results of a study of North American consumers.
“It is too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal, or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music,” Forrester said in the report, which was published for Forrester clients last week and made available to Reuters today.”
But does anyone, beyond Apple, the Big Four Organized Music cartel and the other three or four other high-priced, low-quality corporate online ’services,’ really care?
iTunes never has never been a genuine music service. It started out as a loss leader for iPod and if the Forrester numbers are correct, it still isn’t much more than that, particularly when you count in what’s happening in the real world of online music distribution, the one Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG are trying so desperately to crush by suing their own customers into toeing the corporate bottom line.
“Since the introduction of the iTunes Music Store, Apple has been steadily selling just 20 iTunes tracks for each iPod sold, suggesting that even at $0.99, most consumers still aren’t sold on the value of digital music,” says a summary of the report.
“Even at $0.99″? Like that’s a reasonable price when in fact it’s rip-off in and of itself? No iTunes tune, or any digital download from a Big Four supplied site, is worth more than 25 cents, and that’s still way over the odds.
And, “With half of all transactions costing $3 or less, though, transaction fees threaten to make iTunes unprofitable,” says Forrester .
Apple claims iTunes has sold 1.5 billion songs to date. But how believable is that? As far as we know it’s never given a detailed, or even rough, break-down of how it arrives at that nice, round figure, which doesn’t seem to trouble anyone. Apple comes out with a number and it’s taken as written.
But even if it is accurate, it doesn’t make any kind of impact on what’s happening with online music lovers around the world.
They’re continuing to totally ignore Apple and Napster and RealNetworks in their billions not every year, but every month, turning instead to the free p2p networks and the independent (and reasonably priced) services and increasing number of amateur and professional sites that are springing up as Big Music’s first-ever competitors.
P2p research company Big Champagne tells p2pnet that in 2003, the average number of users from around the world simultaneously logged on at any time in October alone was 3,004,873; in 2004, it was 4,603,048; in 2005, 6,523,733; and up until half-way through October this year, it was 6,562,440.
Figure it out.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
Reuters – Survey finds 65% drop in monthly transactions, December 13, 2006
Forrester Research – Few iPod Owners Are Big iTunes Buyers, December 6, 2006
tells p2pnet – RIAA losing p2p file sharing war, November 17, 2006
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
