April 26th, 2004

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Music
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iTunes Store and Iceberg Journalism

Via Slashdot, I read this story about the one-year anniversary of the iTunes music store. The article is more or less a puff piece for Apple and other online music offerings, and fails to discuss the stores’ apparent success in context. There’s a highly visible pull-out table which propoounds the fact that, in March 2004, the iTunes store sold 4.7 million songs. That number looks impressive, and dwarfs the competition, but how impressive is it really?

In the past year, iTunes has sold a little over 50 million songs. That’s equivalent to about 4.1 million CDs. In 2002, record companies in the US sold about 900 million CDs. iTunes, therefore accounts for roughly 0.5% of all music sold in the US. Add the rest of the world’s CD sales, and it probably gets reduced to about 0.1%–barely a drop in the music industry’s massive bucket.

This is an important fact that this article totally ignores. Iceberg journalism at its best. The story also fails to mention that CD sales are generally increasing.

I’ve said it before and I’m probably beginning to bore you, but I’ll say it again: there’s a better way than DRMtastic downloads.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

morph
April 27th, 2004
1:20 am

Amen. Our fair use rights already provide us with excellent music options.

Anyone remember when home recording was killing the music industry?

downhillbattle does a good job outlining exactly what is wrong with iTunes http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/

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Jens Baumeister
April 27th, 2004
1:58 am

As much as I like DRM-free downloads (one reason I’m still a fan of eMusc, even after they’ve changed their business model), I don’t think that this is the reason CD sales still dwarf online sales.

Love it or hate it, with a DRM scheme like Apple’s, Joe Average will get all he wants, at least in the short to medum run. IMHO the main problem is the industry trying to make the tracks too expensive. $0.99/track might just work, because it’s below that magical $1 limit, but $10 for an album without getting any kind of artwork or any tangible product? (Note that the industry’s already starting to speculate about raising d/l prices, as well.)

I think that’s the main issue people are having – not the DRM scheme. As much as you and me might dislike DRM, I think most people will swallow it as long as it doesn’t get into their way too much, and I think Apple’s DRM is designed so that it won’t get into most people’s way; except for power users and those who generally oppose DRM.

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Melangell
April 27th, 2004
3:12 pm

“$10 for an album without getting any kind of artwork”

Hmmm, I spend sooooo many hours looking at my CD covers.

“I think Apple’s DRM is designed so that it won’t get into most people’s way; except for power users”

And power users are…. the ones who want to share their music with 500 of their closest friends????

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ken n mowatt
May 1st, 2004
11:32 pm

Free-downloads? there is no such thing brother!
They will get you somewhere some time or are we getting a little back from the twenty dollar tunes we’ve paid for from a pile of one song wonders. There are very few singers that can fill a cd worth listening to, so the 98cent song can save me $19.00 at least.

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