iLounge

“Market research body NPD Group found that Apple’s iTunes music service registered the highest awareness, with 20% of consumers aged over 13 knowing of the service. Among Macintosh users, the initial target market for iTunes, the awareness level jumped to 46%.

6% of Mac users also said they’d paid for a song or album via iTunes.           

In contrast, services like Rhapsody and Pressplay, which have been on the market for longer than iTunes, only showed 14% awareness among consumers. Less than 1% said that they had downloaded music from either site.”

“Digital music expert Kevin Arnold, founder of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, says BuyMusic.com lacks Apple’s seamless, one-price-fits-all approach to downloading music. But that’s the nature of Windows, a multitude of platforms and very few licensing rules. Apple, he says, is the epitome of refinement.

‘I would compare Windows to the wild, wild, west,” says Arnold. “And Apple is like a gated community.’”

“In the first day April 28th iTunes sales were at 200,000 per day. By May 5th CNet were reporting that sales had topped 1,000,000 meaning 140,000 songs were been sold per day. By May 14th this figure had fallen to 125,000. While figures published in the The NY Times on May 28th translate the figure into 100,000 per day.

The decline continued from there. 5 million tracks had been sold by June 23rd meaning the average daily sales had now hit 89,000. The figure hit 6.5 million on July 22nd translating into 52,000 sales per day.

The sales figure may reflect seasonal variance and other launch hype related factors. However there is a clear decline in place and with iTunes still failing to sign up some big bands the perceived success of iTunes is not quite what all are making it out to be.”

“The pop album made its way through the 20th century by staying adaptable, transforming itself from analog grooves to digital bits. But can the notion of an album — a collection of songs sold as a single unit, to be heard in a certain sequence — survive the Internet?

That question has been raised more insistently since Apple Computers started its iTunes store, where songs can be downloaded for 99 cents and complete albums for $9.99. Apple recently announced that 6.5 million songs have been downloaded since the store opened on April 28, fewer than half of them as part of albums. Its competition, Buy.com’s buymusic.com, is expected to announce its opening on Tuesday, selling downloads for the much more widely used Windows operating system.”

“Apple’s iTunes Music Store could capture 20 per cent of the US paid-music download market, claims Needham’s analyst Charles Wolf in a report this week.

Wolf believes Apple could generate annual revenues of $600 million through its store, and that this figure could increase. He describes the Store as ‘providing an arguably superior customer experience.’”

“The parties are in advanced talks and a deal is expected, though sources warn that negotiations might still unravel.

[...]

At Amazon’s annual meeting last week in Seattle, Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive officer, talked about opening a digital music store, telling reporters, ‘We’ve been looking at it for years.’”

“In a masterstroke of technological and marketing acumen, Apple Computer appeared to have seized the digital music industry last month by boldly creating its own retail download service.

The Macintosh maker, diagnosed being near death in the 1990s, seemed to have pulled off another miracle: Its iTunes Music Store sold 2 million songs in its first 16 days, dwarfing rival download services and drawing raves from Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Yet even before the initial euphoria could subside, the company began hearing familiar rumblings from points north—namely, Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash.”

“In just its first month of operation the service, by the company’s estimate, has sold three million songs online, at 99 cents each. This is an impressive figure considering the limited access that music fans now have to the service.

[...]

“We designed it to allow friends and family to easily stream (not copy) their music between computers at home or in a small group setting, and it does this well,” the statement said. “But some people are taking advantage of it to stream music over the Internet to people they do not even know. This was never the intent.” A spokesman for Apple, Chris Bell, said the company made the decision by itself.”