Archive for: downloads
Music Ally has reported that over 445,000 people illegally downloaded the new U2 album. All these downloaded were alleged to happen between the 18th of February till the 3rd of March from BitTorrent sites.
The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.
The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.
Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.
A lot of people get in touch with us to ask how many digital stores we distribute music to, and what proportion of the digital music market they represent. We also hear comments on the relatively small number of people we deal with in comparison to the huge lists of partners at some of our competitors, e.g. CDbaby, Emubands, IODA…(without mentioning the duplication in the last two).
The simple truth is that while a long list of digital music stores might look good, beyond the top 3 or 4 retailers it makes very little difference to overall sales how many your music’s in. It’s fairly common knowledge that iTunes is the biggest player in the market, but the scale of their dominance is pretty staggering. Neilsen (the ratings and market reporting firm) reports total US music sales of 1,513 million units in 2008, with 1070 million of those sales being digital downloads. That’s a billion digital music downloads across the entire US.
In 2008, across all territories, iTunes sold more than Two Billion tracks.
| Apple iTunes Store Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/08/2004 |
100 |
| 16/12/2004 |
200 |
| 02/03/2005 |
300 |
| 10/05/2005 |
400 |
| 18/07/2005 |
500 |
| 10/01/2006 |
850 |
| 23/02/2006 |
1,000 |
| 12/09/2006 |
1,500 |
| 10/01/2007 |
2,000 |
| 09/04/2007 |
2,500 |
| 31/07/2007 |
3,000 |
| 15/01/2008 |
4,000 |
| 19/06/2008 |
5,000 |
| 06/01/2009 |
6,000 |
Excuse the horrid old excel graph, I’m still running Office ’03…
It’s difficult to get a believable estimate for the size of the global digital music market, but given that the USA is the biggest single economy by a long way (the whole of the EU only just beats it in the CIA factbook at $14.98 trillion to $14.58 trillion), you begin to get a picture of how much of a monopoly iTunes has. Their competitors are of a different order: Amazon weighed in at 27 million digital tracks sold in the first six months of 2008, and the CEO of eMusic (David Pakman) estimated that Amazon have got about 4%-5% of the US music market, which going from Neilsen’s estimates puts them at about 48,150,000 tracks annually. Pakman also claims an approx. 10%-15% market share for eMusic, with 7 million downloads sold monthly (7*12 = 84).
By browsing eMusic’s sales milestone press releases, you can plot a rough course for their sales:
| eMusic Digital Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/09/2004 |
0 |
| 01/12/2004 |
3 |
| 01/12/2006 |
100 |
| 25/09/2007 |
160 |
| 14/04/2008 |
200 |
| 20/11/2008 |
250 |
I’ll spare you another ugly graph. eMusic has sold 250 million tracks since it’s relaunch in 2004, and Amazon’s only been going for about a year now, 300 million tracks let’s say, which pales beside iTunes’ 6 billion total sales.
One can argue with the estimates, but the main thrust of my argument is hopefully becoming clear. A conservative 15% market share between Amazon and eMusic, along with iTunes’ >80% doesn’t leave more than 5% for any other players in the USA: with just those three selling your music for you online, you’ve got 95% of the market covered. It’s not that the remaining 5% isn’t worth catering to, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and customers in the last few percentiles get harder and harder to chase down, especially given the plethora of blossoming and failing little music shops that appear and dissappear. We concentrate our efforts on the vendors that matter.
P.S.
The controversial bulk of music discovery and consumption in the electronic wilderness, outside the paid-for enclosure, is happening on torrent sites like the embattled Pirate Bay, and the more respectable Limewire and Mininova, and promoting RouteNote artists on these channels is something we’re looking into. Ubiquitous innovator Trent Reznor or NIN positively encourages people to download his music from P2P networks, in order to drive sales of his ‘premium’ paid for content.
Have you ever wondered how much iTunes account for digital sales online? One of our competitors CD Baby has published their 2008 results which shows that iTunes currently accounts for over 82% of their total digital revenues. This makes me wonder why artists are really keen to get their music in as many places as possible, instead of just focusing on the top retail points and building a base around them and their users.
In the current climate P2P and Bittorrent file sharing isnt seen as illegal in all countries, but overall it has to be the biggest threat on the music industry because of its nature.
Songbeat has launched a new version of their service which seems to be taking piracy to a new level.
It’s a desktop app that lets users search for music on Seeqpod, Project Playlist, Last.fm and other sites, and then download the files and import them into iTunes or Windows Media Player, or burn them as a CD. It’s free in its basic edition, which only allows 25 downloads, but users have to pay €19.99 for the premium version to download as much as they want.
This has to be illegal! They are now a company that is profiting directly from piracy. Not according to Songbeat: “The downloading of music is not fundamentally illegal. However, it lies in the hands of the user to discern whether or not they have the right to download the particular music file at hand.” Even Musically thinks this’ll end up in court.
(via TechCrunch)
Previously here on RouteNote we have talked a little about musical iphone or ipod touch applications such as the Ocarina, and here is a new one, the iDrum.
The iDrum lets users remix a bunch of classic club tracks with more than 300 samples to play with, tapping the screen to build up layers of bleeps and beats.
There are 3 different apps available in the iTunes store.
Ministry of Sound version – 
Club edition –
Hip-hop edition –
The prices vary depending upon your country, but check it out!!
After spending months in public beta and lots of changes to the ad supported music service, We7 is about to launch out of beta with a bang.
We7 have launched with a “Big Listen” campaign. This new service has some great new features including Free on-demand, unlimited access to full tracks and albums, “Search, Click & Play”, A ‘Celestial Jukebox’ with several million track, ‘Play Anywhere’ – a link and play system for blogs and websites, Users can create playlists, share with friends and buy mp3′s, Payments to rights owners and artists.
The first thing you will notice with the new site is that they have a completely new design. Other new additions include a Magazine, Blog and a much improved list of advertisers. Im sure we will be hearing a lot more from We7 in 2009!
In 2007 P2P music downloads were worth a staggering $69 billion, and all other forms of movie/television piracy are on the rise.
Techcrunch has been talking a lot about using music online as a free promotion tool, because eventually music will be free online. If record labels do use music online as a free promotional tool then they need to have other revenue stream. Warner Music is signing their new artists to 360 deals, in which allows them to have all revenues streams.
Somebody over there needs to put their thinking cap on, quit screwing around and just give the damn music away for free with no lawsuit strings attached.
August was our first full month for downloads and sales. The majority of our sales have come from the all dominant iTunes, but we are looking to push more through eMusic and more. Here at RouteNote we are very happy with the progress of our site and services, and it would be great if you could help and spread the word.
Today, we are announcing that we have finalised all downloads and sales from all stores for all artists. Please check out your sales and earnings history to see how much you have made!
Thanks,
RouteNote Team
7digital (the UK based mp3 store) has started selling music from Universal Music today. This is the first time in Europe the tracks have been offered in 320k mp3′s, and seems to be selling both the new releases and its back catalog.
Hypebot mentions that it is quite strange that there was no formal press release by either party. Here at RouteNote we would be very keen to talk to a representative from 7digital about including our catalog in their system.
Napster has hinted that the company is up for sale again, saying in its response to a dissident shareholder group that the company is once again exploring possible strategic alternatives, and has retained UBS Investment Bank to assist in the process. The company hired UBS two years ago to explore a possible sale, but no deal emerged. Napster informed shareholders of the move in a letter that also said the company believes that three proposed dissident board candidates are “unqualified.”
The company said the dissident candidates “have offered no specific business plan, other than suggesting a vague review of Napster’s business,” and also “have no significant ownership in Napster and, in fact, have been frequent sellers of Napster stock.”
Napster instead urged shareholders to re-elect its current slate of independent directors.
Source: DMW Media
