“Apple undershot its first-year iTunes Music Store download target by 30 million songs, the company admitted today, 12 months after the digital music business was launched. CEO Steve Jobs had forecast sales of 100 million songs, but in the end ITMS users acquired only 70 million – still sufficient to put the store at the top of the download service chart,” Tony Smith writes for The Register.
“Indeed, Apple today claimed a 70 per cent market share ‘for singles and albums,’ based on its own calculations. Customers are buying 2.7 million songs a week from the store – if they continue to do so, Apple will sell 140 million songs next year. Some 700,000 songs are now available for download. ‘iTunes has exceeded our wildest expectations during its first year,’ Jobs said in statement, the infamous ‘reality distortion field’ kicking in at this point, presumably,” Smith writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple has stupidly put itself in the position of taking a wildly successful 70 million songs sold in its first year and making it look like a failure due to Jobs’ artificial “100 million goal.” Note to Steve: don’t set goals in public if you aren’t damn sure that you can hit them. You’ll just give your foes ammunition otherwise; even if the ammo you’re providing are duds, they can still wound. For reference, Napster 2.0 sold five million songs in its first four months of operation or less than Apple currently sells every 12 days.