p2pnet - rss feed: Apple’s new iTunes stores
p2pnet.net News:- Apple has opened four more iTunes Music Stores, this time in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.
With the announcement, Apple says it’s now peddled more than 400 million songs, each locked with Apple DRM, worldwide.
iTunes, which has been around since 2003, “is now selling more than half a billion songsper year,” boasts spokesman Eddy Cue.
Against that, well over a billion songs move around the p2p networks every month, a market the Big Music cartel refuses to acknowledge, preferring to compel Apple, to all intents and purposes the only viable corporate music download site, to sell tracks at a usurious dollar per download.
The Big Four record labels wholesale cookie-cutter digital music files, which are compressed low-fi copies of existing hi-fi CD tracks, at between 65 and 72 cents each. And they want to increase that already grossly inflated rate.
It’s hardly surprising the online music buying public is completely ignoring the corporate offerings.
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May 10th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
Somebody could usefully do some numerical analysis on all this. The Big Champagne top 10 typically shows 5-6 million downloads per week for each track. So just the top 10 is ~50 million a week and so ~2500 million a year. The total download market must be at least 10 times this maybe 100 times and possibly even 1000 times as it’s a very long, flat tail.
So let’s say 100 times. That’s 250,000 Million. So between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude bigger than iTMS.
Put that another way. iTMS has between 0.1% and 1% market share. Doesn’t look so important now, does it.
Just Say No To DRM.
May 11th, 2005 at 9:55 am
The other 100 Million have been unlocked using JHymn etc!