“Napster [2.0], the digital song store and subscription service launched by Roxio in late October, said Monday that it passed the 5 million mark in online song sales. Although that keeps it ahead of other only-on-PC services’ announced sales figures, it remains far behind Apple Computer’s iTunes, which serves both PCs and Macintosh computers,” John Borland reports for CNET News.com.
Apple Computer, in December, announced their iTunes Music Store had sold in excess of 25 million songs. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has stated that Apple is shooting for the 100 million songs sold mark during the first year of iTunes’ operation – or by April 28, 2004.
Napster is in serious trouble, you gotta read this
Napster in trouble, lays off hundreds
Napster has already spend 15 Million dollars already and only has 5 million songs to show for it. We know they can’t be making more than a 35-40� a song, plus they have a subscription service which most people subscribe to. So they really didn’t get 99� a song either.
No wonder they fired everybody..nobody wants to rent music, if they do it’s just long enough to audio hijack it. Then drop the subscription.
Stupid Napster. Good Apple.
Cure disease here
Wow, at this rate they will be profitable by the forth quarter of… NEVER! They are at least $15m in the whole from operations, just borrowed $22.5m and they will be pleased with $20m in annual sales. No wonder their stock price is dropping fast.
It was only a month ago that Roxio’s Chris Gorog was warning delegates at the Midem International Music Fair in Cannes to ‘stay off the Apple platform’ and that their 9.95 per month subscription service will prove more popular than Apple’s a-la-carte service. Doesn’t he know about creating bad karma?
on top of the loss they made already, how much payed Roxio for Pressplay and the Napster brand ? I think $20 million + $ 5 million
I guess the “extraordinary value of the Napster brand” turned out not too be much after all.
I forgot to ask. Does anyone know where one can find numbers on BuyMusic.com and Wal-Mart? *snicker*
Napster 2004 <> Napster 1999
They’ll never recapture the “magic” of their former selves. Napster is dead. Put the cat to sleep. The worst thing they did was get rid of Shawn Fanning. He was the heart of that company.
Does Vegas have odds on which service will fold first? My money is on BuyMusic folding first.
Since Napster is claiming the title of the first pc-only service to sell 5mil songs that means BuyMusic which was introduced roughly 5-6 months earlier is way behind.
here is the alexia tracking data for napster
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.napster.com
(note it is in popularity and on a log plot … also note the daily visits per million — a good approximation to get real visits for all of the US to to multiple by 70)
If I’ve posted this once, I’ve posted it a million times.
The Pee-Sea legal music download market is small. Way smaller than everyone thinks.
Sure, Wintel may have 90%+ of the sales from quarter to quarter, but 50% of those sales go to businesses, government offices, schools, etc. They ARE NOT owned by human beings who use them for ecommerce of any kind.
Of the Pee-Seas that ARE owned by human beings, they are not the same TYPES who buy Macintoshes. These people are often consumers who are looking to buy a $600 all-in-one computer setup by DELL, and are not $300 iPod buyers.
Macintosh buyers tend towards the creative side, generally have more money, or have BUDGETED more money for things like computers, iPods, and music.
Most of the Pee-Sea owners I know who are into music, are students who steal it from the internet. They are COMPLETELY uninterested in buying music from the the ITMS.
Everyone I know who has a Mac is a total music junkie with an iPod, and digs the ITMS because it has made music buying FUN, and if you spend $20, you get 20 of your favorite tunes from a variety of artists. So it seems, and it is, a lot more.
Otherwise that $20 got you one CD.
So in the end, the Mac legal download market is more like 30-40% (because they are owned by human beings who BUY MUSIC) , and the WINTEL base is much smaller, and populated by KazAa fanatics.
Then you add on the fact that the iPod, iTunes, and the ITMS totally ROCKS, and the competition is starting to wash up on the shores like dead fish.
AND, AND, AND!!
Apple is making money from the hardware sales, not the music sales. Setting the price at a break-even .99 cents, Apple forced the competition to match or beat that price. So the competition is locked into a price that offers little or no profit.
All of a sudden the next wave of music stores, seeing how Napster is doing, will pull out or not launch at all. Leaving a bigger market share to APPLE to conquer.
I’m lovin’ it!!
david vesey
Well you guys love Apple just to much, I think their results are not so bad. Remember they are still ramping up their business. I predict them to become profitable in about six other months maybe one year, from their on, they will be able to start paying of debt..
You guys compare Apples with Bananas ! Does anyone have a figure for the number of tunes Apple sold in exactly the same period ?? Remember that growth accelerates, the same might happen to Roxio, at least I hope so..
Steve gave the link for Napster stats.
Here is MusicMatch:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.musicmatch.com
And BuyMusic:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.buymusic.com
Notice the downwards trend for all three services.
This just confirms what has been said now for the last month or two. Napster’s downloads/sales are about 25% of what Apple’s are. This is about to take a major hit though since millions of Pepsi winning caps will be redeemed between now and April 30th. That will only put Napster in a deeper hole. I still say they’ll be dead by year’s end.
People who buy cheap computers at Wal-Mart, etc are of a different demographic than that of the average Mac user. Someone who won’t pony up the money for a decent computer is not going to spend a lot of money on legal downloads.
Silly Napster, Trix are for kids.
Napster claims to be the first PC-only download service to reach 5 million downloads. That makes me wonder: how many downloads has the iTMS sold so far on the Windows side of the house? Any stats?
@optimistic guy
>Does anyone have a figure for the number of tunes Apple sold in exactly the same period?
They sold 10 millions in the first 4 month, IIRC – this was still Mac-only.
Well you guys love Apple just to much, I think their results are not so bad. Remember they are still ramping up their business. I predict them to become profitable in about six other months maybe one year, from their on, they will be able to start paying of debt.
As of last week or so, Apple is a debt free company, taking about $300 million from it’s cash reserves to pay off it’s final debts.
am I reading the alexia.com graphs correctly???
A downward trend means more people are using the site?
The y-axis is inverted.
I think Napster/BuyMusic/MusicMatch are ramping down – not up.
They don’t have the money to market their services property to keep up interest. They don’t have physical players to generate new interest. Walmart will be the intesting one – they have deep pockets.
You’re reading the graph wrong. Yes the Y Axis is inverted. It’s based on Rank not # of hits so 3000 means 2,999 sites got more hits than you did. etc.
AL,
The Y-axis is inverted for easy viewing. The graph is based on the rank of the web site, so smaller number is better (no. 1 rank = most popular). To show that, the y-axis is inverted to reflect the fact that the downward trend means less popular.
Then again what do you expect. They don’t have AAC that everybody else is using (Apple and Nokia again, yes). Vodafone alone sold last year $ 1.3 billions worth of music to Nokia GSM phones. Apple has way to go also. It helps that Apple uses AAC. There is now 1 billion GSM phones in the world. That is a massive market. New models will all support AAC not WMA.
I do wait that Apple ads Nokia support soon. This market is something that Apple don’t want to mis.
Nokia isn’t the only cell phone manufacturer that supports AAC; some Sony-Ericsson models also support AAC. Word is that Sony’s PlayStation Portable will also have AAC support.
Thanks…
But that raises a question, with whom are they ranked against?