“I always enjoy Forrester’s Josh Bernoff’s writing and analysis, but we often don’t see the same data the same ways. So when I read yesterday’s New York Times quick article claiming that iPods aren’t driving iTunes sales, I decided that they must have misquoted him. When I saw today’s article in The Register claiming that iTunes sales are collapsing, I decided there was enough silliness being repeated over and over that I had to run some numbers myself,” Carl Howe writes for Blackfriars’ Marketing.
In his full article, Howe graphs cumulative iPod and iTunes sales on a logarithmic scale.
Howe explains, “A gradually tailing off curve generally still implies substantial growth — iTunes sold a billion songs just in the past 12 months. So the first takeaway from the above curves should be that both the iTunes and iPod sales are growing dramatically… In December 2003, iTunes had sold about 25 million songs for 2 million iPods, or a ratio of about 12.5 to 1. Today, that number is more like 23. So songs per iPod have actually grown over three years.”
Howe writes, “The bottom line: anyone who claims iPod sales are collapsing can’t do basic math.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
Howe is right. Obviously.
Related articles:
iTunes interest climbs as one analyst claims falling sales – December 12, 2006
Akamai Net Usage Index for Digital Music measures real-time global consumption of online music – December 11, 2006
WSJ mistake: ‘digital-music sales have stalled for the first time since Apple launched iTunes Store’ – December 06, 2006
Digital downloads drive world music sales in first half of 2006 – October 13, 2006
Study reports the obvious: most music on iPods not from iTunes Store – September 17, 2006
Apple iTunes Gift Cards help boost growth of digital music in U.S. – April 21, 2006
Dave,
It looks like I’m going to have to spell it out for you, since you seem incapable of understanding a logical thought process.
The original article proposed that iTS sales were plummeting based on credit card expenditure, assuming that increasing iPod sales were increasing the user base proportionally.
I was trying to point out, as others here have also said, not all iPods sold in the past are still in use and many people have more than one iPod. Therefore it would be a more accurate comparison to look at the number of unique iPod users and their purchase record over time. Whilst only Apple know those numbers exactly one can make an educated guess.
Now clearly if the average user was buying 10 times more songs than a year ago, even with the limited information we have, it would have been very apparent that people were significantly changing the way they buy music. This doesn’t appear to be the case – hence my original conclusion.
Is that clear enough for you Dave? Or are you only interested in making asinine comments because you can’t think of anything intelligent to say?
Some of us actually wouldn’t mind having a discussion about these topics, so if you have some opinion on the topic, please tell us. Otherwise grow up and stop being an ass.
@ABQ peter
Go snag yourself a shuffle bro, take a bike ride or something else hands free. You’ll dig it the most!
DogGone says:
“Blah, Blah, Blah”
Nice.
dave:
DogGone is speaking in Faux “news” InfoTainment (TM) -speak.
“Some folks say”
“There are those who say”
“Some say”
“It’s been said by some”
blah blah blah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroon_(people)