12/28/2005, 10:15am, EST
Wednesday, December 28th
Music traffic soars, iTunes dominates
"Even before the Christmas increase, the BPI, the UK record companies' trade association, said download sales had topped 23m this year, five times the 4.7m sold in 2004. weekly downloads already exceed 650,000 and may pass the 1m mark for the first time this holiday season."
Last month, we noted that Apple iTunes Music Store is growing as the most popular destination to purchase music, owning a larger share of the UK digital music download market than the rest of its competitors combined. Based on numbers from September, the data showed that iTunes' marketshare in the UK is 54 percent, while the next closest competitor, Napster, has only 10 percent of the market.
Earlier this month, PayPal began a limited-time promotion, offering up to 25 free songs with the purchase of an iTunes Gift Certificate using PayPal funds.
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: digital music/video
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Maybe by plateaued they actually meant cliffs of Everest or something. It seems far more likely to me that the iTMS train has only just left the station. It's a bullet train only doing about 15 MPH.
Umm, actually you're wrong on the FUD part. Plateauing would favor apple, not the labels. If sales keep moving upward, it would show me that there's a market for higher-priced music. (Hell, you've already got the "I'll never pay for music ever" group, the "I'll never pay for compressed music" group, and the "I'd pay like 30 cents, at most, for compressed music, but not $1" group. They ain't going anywhere. So apparently there's a market for music at $1. And if there's a market for $1, there's a market for $1.50, and $2 (just not as much of one).
And, as I love to point out, if people have no problem spending $2-$4 on a freakin' ringtone, you don't think they'd spend that kind of money on a full song?????
--Mike
Mike, who in the hell do you think you are, coming here to a mac web board, and daring to pontificate logic and reason on anything pro-apple, in essence bashing apple. Don't you know that makes you a troll. Get lost troll! We have no room for people with views other than Apple is great. This isn't about a xmas spike. Its proof that Apple's iTMS is the bestest store ever and will ever increasingly do more business. To say otherwise just proves you use Windows and are part of that covert Windows-lovers camp that will do anything to see apple fail.
Oh, yes, I'm being sarcastic. (I put that in because too many people here can't seem to understand blatant sarcasm, irony, or over-the-top exageration for humor's sake).
That being said, I think ringtones are just one more "sucker" revenue streams for the cell phone companies. :)
The illegal market is already saturated, the legal one is going to continue to grow as "normal" people buy iPods and don't want to or know how to get illegal music. Baby boomers will be buying music online. So I think the "plateau" pressures and the "Everest" pressures will cancel each other out to make good 15% increases for the foreseeable future and that is what we are seeing. Of course increases in markets outside the US will be greater than here.