p2pnet.net News:- Apple says it wants to get its iTunes further into Europe.

It’s had a presence in in Britain, France and Germany since June and now it’s looking at, “more than four to five other countries,” Eddy Cue, vp of applications and internet services is quoted as saying in an Agence France Presse story, which also points out that Apple has sold more than 125 million songs worldwide since the service first went online in the United States in April 2003.

Let’s see – that’s close to 7.4 million tracks per month for 17 months.

That’s a little more than the average of 6,802,130 (peak, 8,324,299) p2p users who were online at any given moment in June, and who move more than a billion tracks around their computers every month, say Big Champagne statistics.

Big Music (not to speak of the studios) is continually complaining that it’s being eaten alive by file sharing which is, of course, sheer nonsense.

“The music-industry lobby would have you believe that sales are down and sinking – as would the general tenor of the media’s industry coverage,” says an LA Weekly report. “But this just isn’t true. In 2004, record sales plainly seem to be rising. Soundscan has registered 252 million records sold in 2004 to date. Compare this with 235 million sold in the same period of 2003, and that’s an increase of over 26 million units, or 6.35 percent.”

It also says: ” If free downloading damages the music industry’s ability to make money on music, why doesn’t all the free pornography on the Web have the adult industry up in arms? What’s the difference between rock & roll, pervy movies and Tetris?”

Instead of suing file sharers, the Big Four record label cartel should be wooing them.

Once the labels and the studios remove their digits from their nether regions, they’ll find that as the 21st century mode of delivery, marketing and sales, p2p will be the answer to most of their woes – including the pirate problem. It’s a bit hard to counterfeit a digital file that’s sold online for 40 cents, say, and flog it on a market corner.

As Julian Bond posted:

“I’d be interested in some discussion and serious analysis of price elasticity in online downloads. I get the feeling that everyone has a price point where they flip from mostly illegal to mostly legal.

“My own experience of this is AllofMP3.com Firstly they actually have a product that I want to buy. eg MP3, LAME 192Kb VBR with no DRM. And that product is typically $0.01 or occasionally $0.02 per Mb. At that price I’m spending more per month than I did at Amazon before it came along.

“So what if Apple, Virgin et al sold non-DRM MP3 192Kb VBR as well. What would you pay for it and at what stage would you pay for the convenience of having properly encoded music with accurate tags and no hassle? It’s somewhere between $0.01 and $0.25 per Mb. I figure that around $0.10 they would make serious inroads into file sharing. This corresponds to somewhere around $0.40 per song. Can they make money at that price point without DRM? Sure they can.”

Yup.

==================

See:-

Eddy Cue – Apple wants to expand music download service across Europe, Agence France Presse, September 29, 2004

Big Champagne – File sharing is booming, p2pnet, July 15, 2004

down and sinking – 3 Myths About the Recording Industry Debunked, September 24 – 30, 2004

posted – Virgin digital goes online, September 27, 2004

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2004 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 1576 times