Last year, Apple sold around 2.5 billion songs and 50 billion iPods. That’s an average of 50 songs (or 4 albums) per new iPod — not 1 album, as you suggest. Significantly higher.

If you look at the totals: 170 million iPods sold since 2001, 6 billion songs sold on the iTunes Store since 2003, which is an average of 35 songs (or 3 albums) for every iPod sold.

If you now add the facts that people who buy a new iPod can keep their old iTS songs and that people can have their iTS songs on more than one iPod at the same time (legally!), you will see that the songs per iPod metric does not show how much consumers have actually invested in iTunes and that they’re genuinely willing to pay for something that could be shoplifted elsewhere.

The iPod is really not the problem for the music industry. iPod customers are carrying their fair share of music purchases. The problem is that the iPod has now reached a certain saturation (though iPod sales are still growing in single digit percentages) and the music industry has to come up with solutions for those 90 % of the world that don’t use an iPod.

Apple’s answer to this seems to be that the iPod (and iTS sales rates) are after all still growing and that the iPhone may potentially (in a few years) reach a larger audience than the iPod could.

C’mon Peter, it’s a 99 cent purchase. People buy music when they hear something they like.

This article is more anti-Apple propaganda from allthingsMicrosoft. Another attempt to make Apple wrong and the labels right.

fact 2: music industry is about live shows now, not songs

I take issue with two assumptions: 1) ‘too lazy and too spoiled’ to steal vs. paying $0.99. Completely wrong. Hang out with any group of 13 year olds and you will be quickly disabused of this fanciful assumption; and 2) the price of music production equipment as a proxy for what music should be priced at is wrongheaded for a variety of reasons: a) quality musical instruments and recording and mixing equipment are still not cheap, b) talented individuals to devote their time to such activities has an associated cost, and c) marketing and distribution, even in the digital world, entails significant expense. Simply there is no correlation between ‘equipment costs’ and quality of product produced, but there is a correlation between quality and compensation. Pro musicians, like pro athletes and everyone else who works for a living, devote time and energy to honing their skills and to creating on the assumption that they will be compensated to some degree. Only non-musicians would assume otherwise.

Perhaps the current middlemen are over priced, but that doesn’t mean middle men aren’t needed and it does nothing to change the fact that recorded music is currently a product without the defenses afforded to tangible products.

I have an Apple computer with iTunes, and a Linux based machine. I’ve used iTunes in the past to download music, and then go through a two step (burn to CD and then rip to make files to play on my Linux based machine). Amazon now makes it easy to download unencrypted MP3 files directly (Apple has this option for some things too but at a premium).

I gave an iPod to a Windows user who loved the device, but hated iTunes. While I like it just fine on my Apple machine, I can see why it might not quite fit in with everything else for a Windows user. They made iTunes for Windows simply to tap into the large non-Apple marketplace. It shows. If Amazon can make a downloader for Linux, so can Apple. They need to
stop trying to make Apple computer users out of iTunes, iPhone and iEverything-else product users.

Bundling a dozen tunes into an “album” is a dead concept, just as justifying higher ad rates for a magazine based on the cost of lumber is a dead concept.

While it is true that our youth have been purged by our school systems of any basis for ethical behavior, they are also too too lazy and too spoiled to steal an MP3 file when they can more easily pay 99 cents for it. Hidden behind industry claims of losing money to theft is the reality that they are losing $15 off the sale of an “album” with three good songs on it.

Music production equipment is dirt cheap compared with what it used to be. Nobody is fooled by the notion that the middlemen in this industry are earning their keep. Someone needs to tell them that continuing to wear those party hats simply makes them look like dunces.

DRM is the holdback?

Please. Let’s all agree that the labels are evil, greedy folk (I’m not sure how that separates them from the rest of the Fortune 1000) and that DRM is annoying. Neither of these explain the problem with the recorded music industry. The issue is simple: many consumers, particularly the avid (read ‘young’) aren’t forced to pay anymore as they can simply ‘download’ (er, steal). So why buy? A whole new generation of music consumers who feel fine with taking what they want for free. Unfortunately for products like recorded music, there simply is no effective and efficient way to protect property rights (the basis of capitalism) so the value attributed to these creations is effectively taken by consumers without compensation. Try that next time you are at McDonald’s.

As for the glorious iPod: it’s a great toy, a very useful device; but with regard to iTunes, it is, and always has been, simply cover for Apple. A legitimate, non-infringing purpose for a device whose popularity is almost completely driven by it’s infringing uses. For every iPod sold, about an album’s worth of tracks is sold via iTunes. So should we assume that all those iPods have a dozen songs? Or perhaps they are just filled with user’s CD collections? Both are hard to argue considering the demographic most enamored with this device a) have them chock full of songs, and b) have no CD collection to start with.

The recorded music industry is broken. And that hurts artists and greedy capitalists alike. Perhaps less navel gazing about the ‘evil record labels’ and nasty ‘DRM’ would be in order for all who love music and wish to see it flourish.

Ironic that their capitulation comes today, the same day you published this! Let consumers buy the music that they want, unprotected, from the vendor of their choice – iTunes – and see what happens…

In their effort to gain business leverage against Apple they have managed to alienate some of their best customers. If they want more sales, they need to reverse their misguided policy at once, and better yet, start selling DRM free losslessly compressed music through iTunes.

I wouldn’t say digital growth is tied to the iPod, I’d say it’s tied to adoption of digital music. Right now, the iPod is most consumers’ foray into digital music. That may change with the emergence of a new product or service. Until then, and as John said, recorded music will be characterized by (a) fewer album sales, (b) more digital track sales, (c) lower overall revenues and (d) more unique transactions.

Buying used CDs on Amazon is a much cheaper way to get music than iTunes or CDs. And lots of people find this perfectly legal way viable. (Of course, the labels would love nothing better than to make it illegal.)

Warner would be in much bigger trouble! Because of the nature of digital music, we’re seeing a migration from album sales to singles. In a mature state it’s reasonable to assume that the music industry could become smaller financially even as the number of financial transactions increases.