Thursday, May 1, 2003 |
13:21 - 275,000 Downloads in First 18 Hours
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/30511.html
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Sounds like the Apple Music Service is off to a pretty brisk start.
Apple's online Music Store sold around 275,000 tracks during its first 18 hours of operation, Billboard magazine's online news service has claimed. That works out at over four tracks sold every second. Now, Apple is charging punters 99 cents per track. It would be interesting to know how much of that goes to artists (performers and composers), how much to the labels and how much is left to Apple.
I'm estimating that I'm going to be spending around $50 per week on music from the service; if these reported numbers are true, representing the purchasing activity of just the most technophilic segment of what's at best 5% of the computing population--just imagine what kind of rate this could ramp to. Even if Apple doesn't extend the service to Windows. But if they do, as the Reg suggests...
Billboard bases the claim for the number of Music Store tracks sold on comment from sources within major music labels. It also alleges that at least two labels have signed up for Apple's upcoming Windows version of Music Store. We'd have thought Apple would have built such a licence into its agreement with the labels from the word go, but maybe that's not the case.
Nope-- now we get to see just how enthusiastic the labels are about the service. If they sign the initial contract, just as a wait-and-see kind of experimantal gesture, that's one thing. But if they then come back for the second round, when Apple goes for the Windows market, then the music industry will have made the irrevocable transforming decision that commits them to the digital age for good.
Seems the independent labels are already clamoring to get on board:
Time asked, "What about independent labels? Will they follow suit?" Jobs responded, "Yes. They've already been calling us like crazy. We've had to put most of them off until after launch just because the big five have most of the music, and we only had so many hours in the day. But now we're really going to have time to focus on a lot of the independents and that will be really great."
I can't blame 'em. And another interesting aspect to this is that the limitations on the selection in the store are almost certainly due simply to a lack of time and priority; they just wanted to get the thing launched, and now the big step is to finish populating the database. It's gonna be huge.
Ya-hoo.
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