“After its first full year selling tracks from all four major labels, Amazon’s digital music store has become the second-largest a la carte service, according to industry estimates,” Billboard reports.
“But it’s a very distant second to iTunes,” Billboard reports. “Major-label sources say that they had hoped the company would have fared better than it did.”
MacDailyNews Take: Colluding to offer DRM-free tracks to every Tom, Dick, and Harry online music outfit except Apple didn’t work, did it?
Billboard continues, “Amazon has yet to release any sales figures for digital music, and it did not respond to interview requests for this story. But Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster estimates that Amazon will sell 130 million tracks this year — a paltry sum compared with the 2.4 billion songs iTunes is expected to sell in 2008.”
“Amazon’s customers are predominantly male — 64 percent, compared with 44 percent for iTunes,” Billboard reports. “The service is also stronger with older demographics: A third of Amazon buyers are 26-35, another third 36-50. Most iTunes users are younger.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]
“Oh, and Derek in Milan, who is “AGL2″?..”
Somehow we all suspected that would be over your head
“Sorry Apple, I’m not here to provide you with a living, your here to provide me a service or product…..”
your here..??
Keep practicing that English, YOUR almost there
Hey Refried & agl82
Have you not been paying attention?
It’s not Apple that’s trying to screw you, it’s the major label’s that is simultaneously trying to sabotage Apple while screwing their customers in a moronic attempt to charge you more money.
Apple has pissed off the labels because they refused to raise prices and bundle songs forcing you to buy music you don’t want.
And you want to . . . criticize that?
I’m a Mac user yet I’ve been using Amazons MP3 Store much more often lately. I haven’t bought anything from iTunes for about a year.
Thats because iTunes doesn’t have as many DRM free songs. Every-time I search a song on iTunes, it’s always a DRM file with 128 quality.
I’ve been getting high quality songs, DRM free, and sometimes cheaper songs on Amazons store.
If iTunes went completely DRM free, then I will resume getting my songs from iTunes again. Now, I only use iTunes to load up my iPods. Many of the old songs I bought back in 2005 on iTunes I deleted & bought them on Amazon because iTunes still doesn’t have the DRM free updates for them.
Apple doesn’t really care if you buy from the iTunes Store or from Amazon, as long as you are playing those songs on iPods (and iPhones). In fact, Apple is probably very positive about Amazon succeeding with digital music downloads, because Amazon sells a ton of iPods for Apple. More digital music being sold by Amazon and iTunes Store means more iPods will be sold.
For Apple, the bottom line in the music business is selling iPods, not selling songs.
I just read where iPods again top Amazon’s sales lists. As was mentioned in one of the earlier posts, Amazon is giving you a $5 mp3 store credit if you buy, well, any electronics over $25.
But perhaps what Amazon should do is up the ante, to $20 or so, depending on size of pod. Yes, eat some margin and give people a reason to spend some time on your site, not just a quick five minutes.
Leave the pods at list price within $5, but heavily give songs away. That’s what Apple resellers normally do that both preserves Apple’s non-sale discounting methods, and drives people to iTMS. Apple wins either way.
Hey troll,
Only the itunes plus tracks are 256kbps AAC, the vast majority are drm ridden turds at 128kbps. So yeah, I think I’d prefer amazon’s 256kbps mp3.
Don’t be such a douche bag!
Until iTunes or Amazon sell their products in ‘lossless’ quality, I’m not buying from either.
When you listen to music in lossless quality from an iPod with Shure 500’s – it’s the same as when you first buy a Mac – YOU NEVER GO BACK!
Believe me, gentle folk. When you use state-of-the-art earplugs, the difference between ‘lossless’ and MP3 is as great as between OS X and Vista.
. . . . . and I’m certainly not alone in this.
There’s a large untapped market of real music-lovers out there – for the taking; and any firm (yeah, even if it’s MS) who supply the goods, will make a killing.
agl82
Why are you still here?
I am a loyal Apple user. Been preaching Mac since the Classic II. But I must confess, when I want a song, I buy it from Amazon first. I prefer .acc over .mp3, but my desire for no dmr is higher up on the list.
Sorry Apple. I know it is not 100% your fault. But I want my dmr free tunes.
To Lilochris:
You represent the exact type of consumer that RIAA desires. The kind that would help them dethrone Apple. They have practically given away the farm through their deal with Amazon. They hate Apple with passion because Apple provided something to the consumers that was missing since the 70’s. It’s called The Single. RIAA’s plan was:
1. Make Amazon No1 and push Apple’s iTunes off No. 1 spot for downloads;
2. Re-work the deal with Amazon to re-introduce bundling, albums, special ‘premium’ pricing and other restrictive sales methods, in order to reduce consumers’ choice and force them to buy filler if they want desired content.
As long as there are people like you, who don’t see this and only follow their wallet, the RIAA stands a bit of a chance. Fortunately, there are only few such people. The rest still buy DRM-infested iTunes songs and Apple continues to dominate. And the final result will be a (n imminent) capitulation of RIAA and the final removal or DRM from the remaining songs on iTunes. While Apple is just a business (much like RIAA is), their business model is based on carefully listening to its consumers. Unlike the entertainment industry, whose creative energy has been focused on figuring out ways to screw the consumer, Apple actually tries to listen and accommodate that consumer.
And to the Muffin Man:
You represent minuscule minority of consumers. The remainder cannot tell the difference between 96kHz/24bit recording and 128-bit MP3, even when played back on Tannoy studio reference monitors. Add to that the fact that vast majority of iTunes customers buy their songs to fill their iPods, which are used on the move (i.e. in a car, on the street, on the buss, on the subway), your point becomes more and more moot.
It would be a colossal waste of bandwidth, as well as storage space, to offer lossless songs to a negligible minority that wants them and cares about the sound quality difference. I have been a professional musician (classical/jazz/theatre) for about 25 years and I don’t care to have lossless on my iPods. I rip my CDs at 128kbps AAC for the iPod and it works fine for me. I CAN hear the difference; it is so negligible, though, that it never bothers me. It’s not like I have a recording studio when I’m on the subway.
ag182
Get off the site and go “F” yourself…. you D-bag.
The stupidity of the recording “industry” continues to amaze. They continue to try to weaken their only serious digital customer, forgetting that iTunes is really on #2 to piracy.
Apple can live just fine without the iTunes store.
In fact, Apple can live just fine an iPod in decline… and games and other apps on the iphone platform could make music less important.
But somehow, weakening the billion dollar iTunes channel is seen as a sane strategy. Ummm…. generally in business when you have a successful channel, you would to INCREASE your sales through it.
But just like Apple is always a couple of chess moves ahead… the music “business” is always many moves behind.
For the price of a few songs, I can now buy games instead.
These guys are worse than MS with the Zune… fighting yesterday’s battles.
Darwin is a slowpoke… but he gets there.
http://www.xkcd.com/511/
I’m sure you all would find this amusing…
Re: quality of songs…
Almost everyone who commented on this is just plain wrong, so here are the facts. AAC (iTunes) is higher quality for the same bit-rate than MP3, and very noticeably so.
When comparing two songs of the same bit-rate (Amazon to iTunes 256 for example) the iTunes AAc file is always going to sound a lot better and 99 times out of a hundred cannot be told apart from the CD original.
Most people in a blind test think that the 128 AAC files from iTunes sound as good or better than the 256 MP3’s from Amazon. I don’t have the link but you can look it up if you want, it’s true. They are certainly light-years better than any 128 bps MP3.
Overall, if you want quality that is *indistinguishable* from CD quality, but without the file size, you want 256 bps AAC files (iTunes Plus), and overall, iTunes is the place you will find the higher quality files, not Amazon.
Also, anyone who’s ever been on LimeWire or whatever can tell you that the majority of MP3’s out there are 128 bps or lower and people listen to them all the time without complaining, so the whole issue is a bit of a tempest in a teapot anyway unless you are an audiophile.
All this arguing back and forth about it is just hot air really, but to argue that “Amazon got teh quality” is just plain wrong.
Good lord, MDN are the worst type of Apple fanboys…
I hate, loathe, and abhor the RIAA, but they should be encouraging competition in the marketplace
Dude, you forgot two of the cardinal rules of this site:
First, monopolies are incredibly evil, unless of course it’s an Apple monopoly. Then it’s good.
Second, where Apple’s a distant runner-up in market share, as in the case of Mac, it’s “the top percentage of the market”. Where Apple leads in market share, any competitors are “paltry” and “a joke”.
And we dare to accuse the Windows world of bias….
Jeremy,
Isn’t “CD quality” an oxymoron?
Ground Rules
Go look up “monopoly” in the dictionary and then get back to us.
> First, monopolies are incredibly evil, unless of course it’s an Apple monopoly.
Second, there is no such thing as an Apple monopoly. But there will be one day when:
– Everyone who now uses Windows is using Mac OS X (officially licensed when market share on Macs reaches about 25%)
– The only major brand digital media players maker left on the market are all iPods
– And “everyone” uses an iPhone.
How’s that for MDN fanboyism?
@ ground rules
“First, monopolies are incredibly evil, unless of course it’s an Apple monopoly.”
Ahh, using the same definition of “monopoly” Psystar tried to go with, I see. Didn’t work out so well for them, did it?
(…okay, so we’re discussing iTunes rather than Macs here, but still, I couldn’t help but notice the parallel)
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It is kinda surprising that amazon has done so poorly. I’ve downloaded the same amount of music from Amazon as iTunes (2-3 albums and two or three single songs) and found it very easy to use, and the amazon helper program did a seamless job transferring tracks over to iTunes. There really wasn’t much difference between using the two.
it looks likes for all the frewfraw from the anti-DRM folks that most people don’t care about DRM, or more likely that Apple’s DRM is unobtrusive enough that few people notice it. (I personally think that Apple’s DRM is rather painless because anyone with enough machines to run into Fairplay’s restrictions is going to be at a level where they more than capable of circumventing those restrictions.)
I’m happy, though, to see amazon treading water. Real live competition is good for everyone–the type of gaming the RIAA has been trying, on the other hand, isn’t real competition. Temporary good prices so they can raise prices and restrict what is available later on is bullshit, and it is nice to see the scheme fail.
As for me, I don’t care other than as a spectator. I’ve been consolidating my music tracks this weekend, and they now are about 2.3 TB of files spread over three external drives. At some point I’d like to copy everything over to a couple of 1.5TB drives and put the externals in the closet as backups. About a third of what I have is CD rips, 1/4 is live concerts downloaded from dimeadozen, another 1/3rd is torrents (although a big chunk of my torrenting was stuff I have on CD and just don’t want to pull out of boxes in the attic and stuff that is out of print). So only that little one twelfth remaining sliver is from iTunes/Amazon/eMusic combined, and the vast majority is emusic. But emusic is losing its shine for me–I can’t fill out my monthly quota most months, at least not without blowing half the quota on baroque albums made up thirty tracks, each two minutes long.
@ agl82
Amazon’s not competition – it’s fishbait.
I won’t single you out – but I say to everyone – ‘claims’ or
‘entering a new market’ don’t make ‘competition’.
If you walked onto the ball court with Michael Jordan,
does standing in front of him make you ‘competition’? No!
Emusic has a convoluted ‘we want your credit card number first’ sign up policy. Others have slow, small-text flash interfaces. The only 2 sites I’ve seen for music lovers are iTunes and Junodownload. JD caters more to a dance, DJ crowd – but it’s the best in it’s field, featuring more genres than iTunes. I use both.
Any music lover who values freedom and quality should favor iTunes over Amazon. As others have noted, if Amazon “wins,” it’s really the RIAA who wins–bundling and restrictive marketing/DRM practices will be back and dominant. Apple is the only company we can be sure is looking out for consumers. Amazon has no history of challenging the RIAA on behalf of consumers; instead, they’ve agreed to be the RIAA’s tool to take down Apple in order to let the RIAA take control again. If that wasn’t so, the RIAA would not hate and fear Apple with a passion–which they obviously do and have been quite public about. If iTunes’ DRM really bothers you, get the music from Limewire. Buying from Amazon just strengthens the RIAA cartel and, ultimately, works against your own interests.
Jake – I fully agree with you. That is why I first look for songs on iTunes then Limewire. Then I say fsck it I don’t want that song anymore.