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Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week 158

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the every-dog-has-their-day dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us Yahoo News is reporting that the last week of December turned out to be a golden week for music downloads. From the article: 'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports. In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm's one-week record for download sales.'"
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Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week More

Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week

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  • Looks like the music/movie industry is really hurting now. You would think they would let up on crushing the little guy [betanews.com] Nah!

    • It's all about visions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by argoff ( 142580 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:53PM (#14424982)

      It really is all about visions. To many of us, the intnernet envisions a future with the uninhibited unrestricted free flow of information - where all knowledge and creative works will be birthed into the world thru creative collaberation, or thru services, or thru just plain giving for free as a side effect of private interests. To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future where every piece of content is tagged and charged for with the promise of unlimited profit and royality and the prospect of endlessly being able to nickel and dime the consumer to the highest order - but to inpose this vision requires that they coerce upon people and technology companies, an infrastructure of controll - where no piece of information can leak out and risk becomming free.

      Moral: This is like an ALL or NOTHING game

      People who want to play half hearted, and allow some room for copyrights in this age are only going to continue to feed the beast that is trying to enslave them. Copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off peoples freedom until we cut it off at the root. One of these days people are going to realise that copyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control. Controll, even if that means the loss of privacy, free speech, and controll over our PC's.

      • Re:It's all about visions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @01:06AM (#14425215) Journal
        I thought the main problem with Copyrights was the Micky Mouse style extensions that pushed the term into something like lifetime + 90 years.

        . One of these days people are going to realise that copyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control.
        Of course it's about control. And of course it's about artists, writers, developers, etc.

        Just because something is being abused, that doesn't make it inherently bad. copyrights & patents are like guns. They don't hurt anyone until somebody with bad intentions come along.
        • Nobody ever died when someone with the intention to pirate music for personal gain used p2p. Also there is no consititutional right to download music. Your analogy is good but not perfect.

          I personally would prefer to compare copyright laws with taxes. They are painful to anyone who is not directly benefited but are still not ALWAYS bad.
        • Just because something is being abused, that doesn't make it inherently bad. copyrights & patents are like guns. They don't hurt anyone until somebody with bad intentions come along.

          Is it "bad" to use a gun to hammer in a nail? That's what copyright does in world with an internet. It is not the right tool for the task, and any attempt to make it the right tool produces large negative side-effects with little to no actual benefits.

        • Just because something is being abused, that doesn't make it inherently bad. copyrights & patents are like guns. They don't hurt anyone until somebody with bad intentions come along.

          Copyrights are like the bad tree that bears bad fruit. The fact that they get more and more out of controll as time goes on should really be saying something here. Like slavery was back 150 years ago, it's a form of control - under the guised name of a property right. The copyrights industry understands that there is n

      • Re:It's all about visions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mejesster ( 813444 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @01:09AM (#14425223)
        I agree on your view of the two conflicting visions, but I disagree on the possible outcomes. Copyrights MUST continue to exist and artists MUST be compensated. Hollywood and the RIAA are right when they say that if sales stop, so will the product. That does NOT mean we have to be saddled with DRM laden crap. Buy the CD and rip it yourself. Buy a DVD or DVR and timeshift/placeshift to your heart's content. Fair use is not piracy and please don't confuse the two. I envision a future where the corporations provide a product I want at a fair price in a manner that is convenient for me... but my kind of vision is nothing but a dream.
        • Yay a banner year for online music purchasing!

          Wake me up when they break the maximum music transfered by a single p2p network.

          Isn't the fact that people have access to music more important than that it is produced? The RIAA has moved away from the idea that people should get what they want or that they care that people should have access to the most possible music.

          But further they seem to be moving away from any possible reason for existance... People would have more music, more freedom, and more vari
        • I know plenty of people who do artistic things for free or at a personal loss. They do it in order to share things with the people around them. The truth is that most good art is underground and most corporate "art" is not worth anything, much less the exorbitant price tags it carries. You're trying to equate artistry with employment. Most of the world's artists make very little money through their avocations. Even the "art" or entertainment that is being mass-marketed provides very little benefit to m
          • So artists should pour their "heart and soul" into something just so you can get it for free?
        • Why is it that so many take it as a mantra of faith, it seems, that without a copyright imposed monopoly - all artists will just be starving fools on the streets looking for patronage. In fact, it kills me that everyone is supposedly justifying all this controll in the name of artists, but when you look at the facts - copyrights provide a decent living for maybe 1% of 1% of artists, whilt the 99.9% are locked into paying for any other song they want to perform live or copy. Fod God's sake, give a live co

      • Nickel and diming (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Z34107 ( 925136 )

        "To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future [...] with the promise of unlimited profit"

        Jinkies. The internet makes publishing music (or almost anything) cheaper than the traditional method of putting a CD in a store. As bandwidth and computing costs continue to fall, this will become even cheaper, putting online publishing into the grasp of more and more people. Given time, this Radiant Future will inevitably lead to competition with the oligopoly that is the R

        • "The debate should be on whether or not these artificial burdens on the consumer are worth the extra innovation of the producer."

          I don't get it. We have something that can take months and thousands of dollars to produce, or in the case of movies, years and millions of dollars, and price it such that those people who actually want it pay a small piece of the price it took to create it. Those who don't want it pay nothing.

          This is a burden?

          • We have something that can take months and thousands of dollars to produce, or in the case of movies, years and millions of dollars, and price it such that those people who actually want it pay a small piece of the price it took to create it

            This is what I'm talking about, and what I've always believed. This is also especially true with drug research. I just wanted to say the "information should be free" argument is crap without provoking the vehement and simultaneous hatred of every Slashdot denizen.

      • That's the best summary of the clash between information freedom and Big Media that I've possibly ever read.

  • Whoa (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the-amazing-blob ( 917722 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:30PM (#14424912) Journal
    With all this, how can the RIAA still say they're losing money? I don't see how their argument works anymore.
    • Because they declared that they were losing money on albums a few weeks back.

      Besides, even if they're making record yearly profits, every crocodile tear means another piece of corporate welfare legislation from our bought and paid for politicians.
    • 3.3 million players bought in the run-up to Christmas and only 30 million songs sold to be put on them? Unless everyone bought a $200+ player to listen to the same 10 songs over and over, they're getting songs from elsewhere, which must be illegally.

      That's what they'll say, anyways.

      • Re:Illogical arguments are still arguments... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Firehed ( 942385 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @12:47AM (#14425154) Homepage
        Yep. Only the RIAA could be so ignorant as to think nobody with an MP3 player actually (legally!) owned CDs prior to recieving their new shiny iPod. Honestly, with how much money they've gotten questionably, you think they could afford to come up with an argument about piracy hurting sales that actually made sense. They know damn well that them pissing people off and suing them is what's bringing down sales; if they can't make that connection, they certainly shouldn't be in such a monopolized position.

        Of course, with how much Podcasting is taking off, your entertainment doesn't necessarily have to be music, and certainly doesn't have to cost anything.

        • Re:Illogical arguments are still arguments... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by friedmud ( 512466 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @01:55AM (#14425383)
          Your statement describes my situation...

          I got an ipod nano for christmas (well, and a combined birthday present since my birthday is around christmas) and I have bought a total of 1 song and 1 video (yes, I know the nano can't play video... but I go to UT and _had_ to buy the highlights for the rose bowl ;-)... Even so, I have 167 items currently in my library. How is this possible? _All_ of the rest are rips of my CDs (basically all the CDs I've bought in the last 2 years... I haven't gotten around to ripping the old stuff).

          I have not a _single_ illegal song in my collection but haven't bought many either.

          Further, my brother in law also got an ipod (shuffle) and got a $10 gift certificate from itunes (from me)... by the time I had left his house 4 days after christmas... he _still_ hadn't spent it all (he had bought about 8 songs). He was also filling up his collection with CDs....

          So I think the 10 songs per 1 ipod sounds about right. Despite what _we_ make think here on slashdot, there are an awful lot of consumers out there who got ipods for christmas and don't know a damn thing about any P2P networks or how to get "illegal" songs.... all of these people just install itunes and enjoy how easy it is to buy music (unless you like Evanescence...).

          Friedmud
          • I'll second that.

            I finally got an iPod for christmas (actually a couple weeks early, since I got a deal on a 60 GB photo version). It's got about 15 GB of music on it, all of it legal, and all of it from my CDs. I think I have one stack left to rip to it. I think there's one song from iTunes among the 2700 or so that are on there now, which I bought before the iPod because the CD reissue I got of an album was the british version and didn't have one song from the US version.

            I got it partly because I got si
          • Here's a clip of someone [google.com] that got video to work on his Nano using Linux.
      • In fact, prior to getting my ipod, I had roughly 1200 songs imported into itunes. Of that 1200, 200 were purchased from iTunes. I have an ipod mini and as of today i have 583 items in my purchased playlist in itunes. That includes 1 audio book (4 tracks), season 1 and 4 of monk, and 8 other tv downloads. They do make video ipods now too. While i have imported more of my audio cds that I owned (and some from my wife's collection), most of my new music was acquired on itunes music store since it came out
      • Unless everyone bought a $200+ player to listen to the same 10 songs over and over, they're getting songs from elsewhere, which must be illegally.

        I have around 850 legally purchased CDs and about 300 vinyl records. The total cost of the collection would approach $20,000, and until recently I was buying a several new CDs every month. I have bought a few locally produced CDs over the past year or so, but none from the major ARIA/RIAA companies, and I have no intention of purchasing from those companies eve
    • Pretty easily [userfriendly.org].

      Logic escapes the morons that run the RIAA. Either CD sales show an increasing trend all year long or it means that the dirty pirates are running rampant and it's time to lobby for Orin Hatch's exploding computers again.

      Me? I stopped buying CDs a while ago and don't plan to start up again anytime soon. With all the problems with DRM, malformed discs, and the tactics the RIAA and it's labels are using, why would anybody?

      You want to see this fixed? Get everybody you can to STOP BUYING CDs. It's
      • They're not morons, they're theives. They're not oblivious to logic, it's just that theives only understand the logic of theivery. Anyway, Dinosaurs Will Die.
    • With all this, how can the RIAA still say they're losing money? I don't see how their argument works anymore.

      Why don't you think they're losing money compared to before Internet?

      I can agree with their claims to why may be skewed a bit much to piracy when there are other factors, but where in these news do you find that RIAA makes more revenue now from iTunes and other such sites than traditional places in the past?
    • is that sarcasm? or do you seriously think that one week of increased sales will offset fifty-one weeks of decreased sales?

      okay, how about this, do you seriously think that one week of increased sales will *necessarily* offset fifty-one weeks of decreased sales?

      furthermore, even if the RIAA got 100% of that money, which they don't, not even close, that's $40 million, do you think forty million will make all the difference in their profitability?

      i bet you were being sarcastic. i'm sorry for misreading you.

  • well (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:30PM (#14424913)
    But how many downloads were there on Kazaa?
    • Or, and this is a bit more likely then everyone who got a new mp3 player/iPod for Christmas, how many of them already had mp3s, iTunes files, or whatever before they got this?

      Really, is it that hard to imagine that some people didn't pay to download songs because they already had some music to put on their iPod?

      Kierthos

  • RIAA will spin it differently (Score:5, Funny)

    by lar3ry ( 10905 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:32PM (#14424919)
    Let's see... We forecast forty million dollars of sales, so we've lost twenty million because of illegal pirating!

    The RIAA's "evidence" has always been that sales haven't hit expectations, even if the actual sales are larger than they ever were.
    • It's not the RIAA I worry about anymore, it's the MPAA (movie guys). At least with music the case is generally that there's good music out there we want to hear but can't seem to get it in a usable, portable format for multiple device consumption. With movies, we don't even want to see most of them, so their blaming things on piracy will just get worse when no one goes to see movies again in 2006.

      • Re:RIAA will spin it differently (Score:5, Insightful)

        by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @01:22AM (#14425263) Journal
        With movies, we don't even want to see most of them, so their blaming things on piracy will just get worse when no one goes to see movies again in 2006.

        It's a good point.

        All the BS about piracy impacting sales at the box office for the 2005 year were a complete joke. Take a look at a list of box office revenues by year [boxofficemojo.com].

        The movie industry was all up in arms just because the trend showing up to yearly 10% increase in sales wasn't continued. While the increase streak came close to ending in 2003, it is interesting to note that 2005 will be the first year since 1991 that movie sales haven't increased.

        Damnable pirates! It's just not possible that rising ticket prices and poor movies have anything to do with it! The public is stupid. We tell them to go see movies and they do. It must be pirates, and draconian DRM is the only thing that can save us!
    • Seriously though, RIAA has got the ultimate hustle. Their sales are "hurt" by piracy, so they want the government to do something, but their sales aren't high enough (pesky piracy!), so they want the government to do something, but their sales aren't high enough (pesky piracy!), so they want the government to do something...

      Repeat ad nauseum until supported by government bailouts, airline style (because music is an essential service, of course!).

      And music today is bad enough, imagine the horror when the

    • That's human nature for you. A guy could buy a new toaster during a great sale for $20 and be perfectly happy with it, but if he finds out his friend Bob down the street paid only $15 he'll feel ripped off. He may have gotten a good deal on the toaster, but just the fact that somebody got the same thing for less money makes him feel like he was at a loss. Similarily the RIAA may sell $40 million worth of music, and they have an idea of what's going on with the piracy, so they estimate that an equivalent of
    • They can complain all they want but there isn't anything in the mainstream that I want to buy. Most of the recent releases have just been the same old mush with differnet singers. Give me something decent and I will buy it.

  • I wonder... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by zegebbers ( 751020 )
    what will be the response of the RIAA?

    They're being handed money but I guess they'll still want to jack up prices due to 'high demand'.

  • MP3 market penetration (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dannytaggart ( 835766 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:39PM (#14424939) Homepage
    I found this even more interesting:

    And for the first time, sales of MP3 players are surpassing sales of personal CD players and CD shelf systems

    Something for the music industry to think about.

  • Imagine how much more they could sell (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Saint37 ( 932002 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:40PM (#14424946)
    If the RIAA had not angered so many customers, they would have sold alot more songs. Unfortunately, I know alot of people who won't buy any music at all until the middleman is removed.

    http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/ [stockmarketgarden.com]
    • You know a bunch of informed computer geeks who read Slashdot and maybe Groklaw and are enraged.

      Your social circle (and mine!) are not representative samples of the general population. This stuff doesn't get mainstream coverage, unless it's paid propaganda by said evil organization.

      The word must be spread!
    • oh, i don't know, i am "angry" but i still buy music (from the RIAA). i just won't buy anything but CDs, (vanilla CDs) because that's the only capital-F Free music they sell. i won't pay for a download because it's not even as good as the Free/free (unencumbered) download i can get from gnutella. if iTunes Music Store sold MP3s, i would likely (though not definitely) use them instead of gnutella, for quality and convenience.

  • They are stealing from the mouth (Score:5, Funny)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:43PM (#14424952) Homepage
    Those damm P2P users. They are stealing from the mouth of children musicians. The only reason for having MP3 players, computers, P2P software is to steal from the poor musician that ends up on the street begging for change in the train station.

    Why else would anyone want to record music except to make illegal copies. Why would anyone sing except to
    perform copyrighted music instead of buying the CD, except to take illegal advantage of it. I think the RIAA should sue anyone who sings music.

  • Wait a second. (Score:4, Funny)

    by slashbob22 ( 918040 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:45PM (#14424961)
    At this point in time RIAA would complain about how much more music was being pirated. And I for one would be getting out my little violin to play them a sad song -- though I am unable to because reading the sheet music and playing would be converting between two formats (like analogue to digital).

    So I am stuck here asking how many of those 20 Million downloads are from the poor suckers who's DRM'd music turned against them? I would really like to know, I have had enough bad experiences with DRM'd music to stop me from ever buying it again.
  • I personally downloaded 10 songs from ITunes this week using up most of a xmas gift card. And I have another $15 gift card that I haven't redeemed yet. Please don't rob my house and steal the card tonight.
    • I'm surprised so many gift cards are sold*. You are essentially paying for a product and receiving nothing in return. The files don't even fully belong to you (DRM) and the quality on the ITMS sucks compared to other sources. If you're going to buy music, or give it as a gift wouldn't a gift card to a store, or hell, even cash be a better idea? At least then they actually own something.

      *I hate all kinds of gift cards, not just for digital music downloads. You are essentially exchanging actual currency fo
      • Most stores won't even give you back the change from a gift card purchase. It's an unnecessary layer of complexity to the entire transaction that only benefits the business.

        No, it's a layer that makes you look less like an asshole when you give cash or an inappropriate gift. Gift cards are marginally less offensive than either of those things. So, they are a pretty safe bet compared to most choices. Isn't Christmas all about worshipping consumerism and unreasonable return policies, in the first place?

        • it's a layer that makes you look less like an asshole when you give cash or an inappropriate gift.

          What is wrong with cash or a check again? Seriously, I don't see the connection between cash and anus.

          • Beats me. It's some kind of tradition or belief. Cash is supposedly "dirty" - but buy plastic toys made by sweatshop labor is "The Christmas Spirit." I never said it made any sense, but it is how most people think.
      • Purchasing a gift card for someone lets them know that you put enough effort into the gift to get them a card at a store they will most likely shop at, while at the same time avoiding the purchase of an item that the recipient doesn't want, or need. Nobody wants to endure long return/exchange lines after the holidays, and many gift cards allow you to shop online now.

      • "You are essentially paying for a product and receiving nothing in return. The files don't even fully belong to you (DRM) and the quality on the ITMS sucks compared to other sources."

        Although I haven't used the "other sources," the iTunes music is at least passable. No music "fully belongs to you" or even "belongs to you." The artists own their music, grants rights to the record industry to publish it, and you, in turn, buy a license to listen to one (1) copy of the music for personal, non-profit use.

      • While I agree that gift cards are less personal and meaningful as gifts than actual items, they are more personal and meaningful then cash.

        Gift cards strike a reasonable balance between: I wanted to get you something but don't know what you like. (perhaps because I don't see you very often, and don't know you well enough, or perhaps simply don't know what you already have.) I admit I would be a little disappointed if a close family member got me a gift card to a cd store; but I would be quite appreciative o
  • i suspect for 9/10 cats it's off to the bittorrent shop with the infinite credits cheats

  • KaZaa (Score:3, Interesting)

    by amazon10x ( 737466 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:58PM (#14424996)
    consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers

    Well, apparently a lot of people are also getting their music from KaZaa et al. MSNBC says [msn.com], "Some analysts expect Apple to have shipped 37 million iPods worldwide by the year-end, with about 10 million sold in the key Christmas quarter."

    That would mean everyone who just got their new iPods have loaded a whopping 2 songs onto it. Who said 30GB wouldn't come in handy?

    Assuming people are listening to 128Kbps mp3s on their digital audio players and assuming each song is approximately 4 minutes long it would require 8416 music tracks to fill up a 30GB iPod. This means that KaZaa also enjoyed brisk success with 42,000,000,000 downloads (assuming everyone filled up half their iPod with videos (no, I won't go into the videos right now))

    • Heard of Compact Discs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LFS.Morpheus ( 596173 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @12:13AM (#14425041) Homepage
      Most people still buy, as well as own large collection of, these things called "compact discs [wikipedia.org]." These discs hold music, typically a single album by a particular artist, and can be placed into a computer and "ripped" - the process of reading the digital data on the disc and storing it as a file on the computer.

      Kidding aside, I don't buy music online, because I consider a rip-off. CDs have better quality, do not have DRM*, comes with liner notes, and is itself a physical backup. I know many people who feel the same way. IMO, online music needs to be much cheaper to make up for these shortcomings; the only benefit it has is immediate delivery.

      *I have yet to run across any CD with DRM, and I would definitely return any CD I got that had DRM on it (or not buy it in the first place).
      • Well, I agree, mostly.

        the only benefit it has is immediate delivery.

        Actually, for those of us still stuck on narrow-band internet, it doesn't even have that as a benefit. The real benefit of internet delivery is really for the (unsigned) artists: they can get their music out there to be heard, without signing their souls to the RIAA devils. Though, they should probably use Ogg Vorbis and avoid MP3 unless they pay the patent royalty. But even then, the patent royalty is better than being stuck wit

      • CDs have better quality, do not have DRM*, comes with liner notes, and is itself a physical backup

        I'll give you that CDs have prettier packaging, but the rest isn't really true. Whether or not CDs have "better" quality depends on what service you use. The CD format in and of itself is pretty low quality compared to some other digital formats available.

        online music needs to be much cheaper to make up for these shortcomings

        $1 a song may seem pricey, up until the fact that you consider the average

        • Whether or not CDs have "better" quality depends on what service you use. The CD format in and of itself is pretty low quality compared to some other digital formats available.

          Where are you buying your music online from? Redbook standard is 2 x 16bit channels @ 44.1kHz = 1411.2kbit/s. Meanwhile itunes is compressed to 128kbits/s which is a compression of 11.03x. While it is argueable whether the average listener listing on average equipment will be able to tell the difference, the redbook CDs definitely a
      • i agree with everything you say. i buy CDs regularly (i like half.com) and never listen to the CDs at all, i rip them and listen to the music on my computer. that's far easier than trying to download a (purchased) song and trying to unwrap the DRM. (i download single songs on gnutella, but i don't do that for albums, which i prefer, rather i try to get my hands on the CD and rip it myself.)

        twice, i lost my music collection due to hard drive failure, and i was able to reconstruct a large part of my library f
    • Maybe they are downloading free music legally?

      http://www.magnatunes.com/ [magnatunes.com]

      http://www.irateradio.com/ [irateradio.com]

      Maybe they are transferring their CDs onto their portable players so that they can listen to them more easily?

    • No, it doesn't... you're forgetting that one of the appeals of iTunes and the iPod is that iTunes makes it very easy to rip and import music from your CDs. I don't know about you, but the people in my family have pretty extensive music collections on CDs that they have accumulated over the last ten years. When my sister got her iPod for Christmas, the first thing she did was dig out her binder, rip, and import.
    • Because nobody possibly could've already owned songs (mp3's) previous getting an ipod for christmas. Heck, nobody could've owned an older gen ipod and just upgraded. And for crying out loud, there's no way anybody just ripped their cd's to mp3... You must work for the RIAA.
    • and your theory presupposes that people who received Ipods have not a single CD to their name and/or they can not rip those to the player. Or was I misinformed that the itunes product could rip mp3s from CDs?

    • I own an iPod. Right now I have about 1600 songs on it. Not a single one was purchased through iTunes. Not a single one was downloaded illegally, either. Most of the people I know who have iPods don't use iTunes. Now do they priate music. They do what I do: rip CDs.

      Why the hell would I bother with iTunes? I know very little about the DRM, and I don't really care to learn. My CDs convert easily into MP3s that I can play on as many devices as I please. I can buy them used and get them pretty darned

  • their industry lost $7.8 billion the last week of 2005

  • Gives Apple good leverage in contract negotiations (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Monday January 09, 2006 @12:09AM (#14425028)
    Pretty shortly Apple has to re-negotiate the contracts with the studios - at which point they will push for higher song prices.

    These record sales will help Apple maintain the current pricing, as the more money flowing into the studios through ITMS the harder it will be for all or most of them to pull away.

    • Re:Gives Apple good leverage in contract negotiati (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @12:47AM (#14425152) Journal
      How come, when we're talking about Apple, no one brings up the idea that in the next round of negotiations, Apple might try to get a bigger cut?

      It would kinda be like Disney and Pixar. Sure Disney can make their own money, but Pixar has been generating crazy amounts of money for them.

      I have a tough time seeing how the RIAA's music companies can walk away from iTunes without having to deal with some kind of shareholder lawsuit.

      I can understand that they have to make a good faith effort to get more cash out of Apple, but what are they going to say if Apple refuses? "Apple wouldn't give us more money, so we decided to cut off this money maker entirely."

      • Possibly... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) *
        I can understand that they have to make a good faith effort to get more cash out of Apple, but what are they going to say if Apple refuses? "Apple wouldn't give us more money, so we decided to cut off this money maker entirely."

        Actually I can see Sony doing exactly that, just like in Japan... remember these are not rational folk we are dealing with. The very phrase "cut off his own nose to spite his face" may as well have been invented for these people.

        So while it's an intersting idea to have Apple seek a
      • What is to stop Apple from "agreeing" to tiered pricing while embedding more profit into the sale of each song for themselves? It would be the perfect opportunity for them to do so, raise prices and let the industry take all the blame.
        • ''What is to stop Apple from "agreeing" to tiered pricing while embedding more profit into the sale of each song for themselves? It would be the perfect opportunity for them to do so, raise prices and let the industry take all the blame. ''

          It looks like Apple wants to keep it simple. Simple means: One song = $0.99, one record = $9.99 (different prices in other countries).

          As an extreme example, everyone in Britain sold the Life Aid single for £1.49 online, with £0.70 of the price going to Life Ai

    • Re:Gives Apple good leverage in contract negotiati (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, many people feel prices won't be raised for some time due to recent antitrust investigations into digital music. Story here [com.com]

      I have to say that it doesn't seem out of character for the RIAA to just go ahead and demand higher prices despite the investigation. Personally I think it's rather obvious the RIAA is rolling in the dough, and even if antitrust practices are found the slap on the wrist they get will probably not even begin to make a dent in the money they made from inflated prices.
      • Actually, many people feel prices won't be raised for some time due to recent antitrust investigations into digital music.

        I was kind of wondering about that aspect; how can music studios demand higher prices from Apple when all the other stores are priced at .99 - or lower? The studios would have to say "if you give us the higher price we'll force the other sellers to also raise prices" - and that has anti-trust written all over it.

        I sure hope Jobs is secretly taping the contract negotiations to release af

  • 20 million revenue, eh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by AndreiK ( 908718 ) <AKrotkov@gmail.com> on Monday January 09, 2006 @12:09AM (#14425030) Homepage
    So I'm sure that that revenue will be seen as cutting money from CD sales, and a great representation of piracy by the RIAA, won't it.

  • Apple vs. Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chief Typist ( 110285 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @12:23AM (#14425071) Homepage
    And this is why Apple announces new products/services a couple of months before Christmas.

    Microsoft, on the other hand, does it after the holiday season at CES.

    Go figure.

    -ch

  • New paradigm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Announcer ( 816755 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @12:35AM (#14425103) Homepage
    It's high time for the music industry to wake up. Digital music delivery systems are the new media of choice. They need to stop fighting it and embrace it... before it passes them by. The music industry needs to stop thinking "We're in the CD business."

    They are a lot like the Railroad Industry of old, whose narrow vision is what led to their rapid demise... They were thinking "We are in the RAILROAD business". If they had thought "We're in the TRANSPORTATION business", instead, things would have been different for them.

    New dance, same old song.

    • Huh? All those millions of songs that were sold were sold by the music industry. What do they need to do differently exactly?
    • The music industry needs to stop thinking "We're in the CD business."

      No, the music industry needs to start thinking "Hey, if we're going to get rid of CDs, we're going to need to replace them with something." Because at the moment digital music stores all provide their wares in lossy formats. So that's why I usually don't bother with them. As soon as Apple starts giving out FLACs, (well, it'd probably be Apple Lossless), then we have a viable alternative to CDs.
    • They need to stop fighting it and embrace it... before it passes them by.

      They know what they are doing and it's being done by DRM and stupid laws. The music industry knows CDs are dead and hates them but will take full propaganda advantage of the demise of the retail store. Record stores have always been shaky and shaken down business and it's very difficult to find an independent one today in the face of Virgin, Walmart and other RIAA dump sites. You could say the fix was already in but they will cry a

    • It's high time for the music industry to wake up. Digital music delivery systems are the new media of choice.

      It's well past high time for them to wake up. At this point, they are like the kid laying in his bed with the noon sun shining through his window, buried under covers with a pillow on his head, muttering "don' wanna geddup, 's Saturday."
  • So, who are these other, miscellaneous download retailers? How do their figures break down as a part of the 20 million?
  • It is really so great to be right all the time [slashdot.org].

  • Put the iPod down and back away slowly... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by One Childish N00b ( 780549 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @06:04AM (#14426072) Homepage
    'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers' (Emphasis mine)

    Bad Nielsen Soundscan! Your fanboyism is showing! Precisely what was the point of mentioning that the MP3 player most bought was the iPod? The one I bought myself certainly wasn't; the one I bought my girlfriend certainly wasnt; who cares? Not everyone is painfully in love with the iPod and it's line of bastard cousins.

    I'm used to this sort of Apple/iPod namedropping from the /. hordes, but I don't expect it from so-called professional companies (yeah, yeah, Slashdot is a professional company, OSTG and all that, but this is a news aggregator, it's not supposed to be their speciality to do the sort of reporting Nielsen has done here).

    Am I the only one left who can't bear to go one story without some reference to how superior I am to everyone else for having the sense to buy a particular brand of pocket MP3 player?
    -1, Flamebait, sure, but this is really getting rediculous.

    (For the record, I am a happy Mac user on the desktop)
    • "Precisely what was the point of mentioning that the MP3 player most bought was the iPod?"

      The fact that these numbers were examining sales at the iTunes Music Store? A vendor whose product doesn't work with the other players?

      Just why is it that every owner of a non-Apple portable music player feels the need to drone on about how the media is biased toward the brand that dominates the market, anyway?

  • This is good news for DRM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Monday January 09, 2006 @11:17AM (#14427898) Homepage
    I'm sorry for all the nay-saying Slashdot Geeks: But consumers just don't care about DRM. Everyone I know who buys music from an online music service is getting secure WMA or FairPlay music files, copying them to their MP3 players, and whistling with happiness. I have yet to hear one of them go "Oh My Gosh! You mean, I can't copy those files to another MP3 player? Or to my friend's MP3 player"

    Now, maybe in 3 years when they go to buy new MP3 players they will complain that their music collection is useless. But more likely, they will burn those music files to CD, then MP3 them again and be fine with it. I can hear the screams of anguish from the audiophiles talking about the loss of quality from the MP3->CD->MP3 conversions. It won't matter since most of those MP3 players come with cheezy earbuds anyway.

    Right now, DRM is winning. This is really bad news for those of us who don't want to hack their BIOSs to install Linux in a few years...

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