MacDailyNews Take: Eliminate the Middlebronfman and, BINGO, “return to growth.”
Nakishima continues, “After the company reported a wider loss, Bronfman pointed to new ‘access models’ based on monthly music subscription plans, and the entry of Google Inc. and others into the business to reverse a decade of declining CD sales. ‘Digital growth … has the opportunity to return to more robust growth rates as we see the introduction more broadly of access models and new business models beyond the iTunes model,’ Bronfman told analysts.”
MacDailyNews Take: Schizo bastage. One day he loves iTunes, the next he’s “looking beyond” it; off dreaming of some other dead end tangent.
Nakishima continues, “Revenue from digital sales of recorded music grew just 3.7 percent to $169 million. That’s a slower pace than the 4.5 percent growth posted a year ago and 39 percent growth two years earlier,. om Apple Inc.’s iTunes store are slowing as the market matures, especially in the United States. Late adopters of new gadgets such as the iPod and iPhone generally consume less content than early buyers.”
MacDailyNews Take: Sales of a non-essential item grew 3.7% amidst a deep recession. Sorry for the reality interruption.
Nakishima reports, “The third-quarter gains in digital music sales were limited to markets outside the United States. Domestically, digital music sales fell 3 percent to $102 million. Digital music sales outside the U.S. grew 12 percent thanks mainly to the later introduction of iTunes and a smaller base. Sales of physical CDs and vinyl records declined 25 percent to $350 million from $469 million, according to Warner’s earnings release.”
MacDailyNews Take: Warner’s mess is indicative of what happens when you substitute poor planning, wishful thinking, and inept management for the execution of timely proactive steps. Edgar ought to be on his knees kissing Steve Jobs’ feet daily for the fact that there is even a Warner Music around today for him to continue to mismanage into the ground, not looking “beyond” that which saved his ass.
Nakishima continues, “Online piracy and declining shelf space for CDs has hurt physical music sales industrywide. Warner also suffered from fewer big releases, as its top-seller, the soundtrack to the latest in the ‘Twilight’ movie saga, compared poorly to prior-year releases such as Green Day’s ’21st Century Breakdown.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Make better music and you’ll sell more product, Eddie.
Bakishima continues, “Warner’s loss expanded in the three months to June 30 to $55 million, or 37 cents per share, from $37 million, or 25 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue dropped 16 percent to $652 million from $773 million.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t worry, dummy, Steve Jobs will save you yet again as soon as he flips the switch on iTunes music subscriptions.
It is hard to imagine being in the middle and somehow managing to shaft oneself but the middlebronfman has achieved the seemingly impossible yet again!
First time he shafted himself was when he refused to take the experts advise and insisted on raising the price of his already overpriced tat.
Unless one is vacuous or suicidal, I cannot see how one can cough up the moollah he thinks he can extract in the current economic climate.
I feel sorry for that man.
Ps The last company to use the term “beyond” found that it had gone beyond its depth literary costing its CEO his job and the company billions.
Has the Middlebronfman got that kind of moollah to afford going “Beyond iTunes”?
iTunes sales growth more or less stalled PRECISELY when the music industry enforced a complicated pricing model.
nuff said.
@SamLowry:
+1,000
I NEVER spend more than $0.99 on a song. The fact that about half the time I look for a song it ends up being $1.29 means I look for songs much less than I used to. And THAT means my music purchases on iTunes have dropped significantly.
When iTunes went to 1.29 I started buying a lot less music. Go back to 99-cents. Frankly, most pop music not even worth that.
x1 Bazillion.
Thats exactly the issue. $1.29 for songs that are more popular is bu**shit. I can understand supply and demand rules applying to products with finite resource limitations, but for digital code-copying it’s just a money grab plain and simple. These idiots just don’t get it.
I still buy more music using a combination of iTunes and online retailers than I ever did with plain old bricks and mortar shops, but it gets to a point where I just don’t have the time to consume any more media.
Pardon me, but when Green Day and U2 still outsell any *new* stuff, when they ought to be relegated to elevator music, speaks loud and clear about a big part of the problem. Not something a middleman can fix.
…and on another note – the economy has been suckin’ it for a few years now and people may not have as much disposable cash which may have something to do with weak sales…I’m just sayin’.
Music is crap today. It has sucked since the 70’s
There are droughts in Pop music. There was one in the 7os. and another in the 80s. Why not now? When the music is boring, people don’t buy it.
99¢
Here’s an idea:
Pay the guy $1 per year.
Award him quarterly stock options at the average market price of the previous quarter as the strike price.
(I’ve heard some fruit company has a similar model for it’s most senior staff.)
Then if the company does really well he makes billions. If the company does really poorly he loses money.
I agree with Sam, Jake, and Sam and Jake. When songs starting costing more than $.99 my splurging on songs pretty much ended.
Buyers saw the $1.29 price and voted with their wallets.
Middlebronfman, refusing to blame himself, returns to the money pit alternative of subscription services.
$9.00 a month for all the movies you can watch works because it’s a lot cheaper than cable and going to the movies.
$15.00 a month for music when radio is free just won’t work.
I’ve said it before, the music industry is in the dump because they hire LOOKS suitable for their soft porn videos on MTV, not talent. Some not so gorgeous people made some fantastic music in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.
Stop trying to make models into musicians and let talent come in whatever form it comes in. If MTV had been around in the 60’s we probably never would have heard of Mick Jagger or Janis Joplin. They became sexy after they were famous, not before.
@Smelltheglove
Radiohead? Franz Ferdinand? Muse? Keane? Phoenix? Arcade Fire? Kaiser Chiefs? You do know there is music BEYOND pop crap, right?
He can always raise prices another 30%. That seemed to spur growth last time he tried it. Yeah, $1.69 a track. That’ll kick iTunes into gear!
The music industry is still relying on a business model that puts great emphasis the business end of an art form. Music is an art that is always evolving and reinventing itself. The best way to handle this is to deliverer what the people want. People want to be immersed in music, they want to own the music they buy and share it. Give artists the money they are owed. Screw the stupid contracts and let the music be free.
My music library was nearing 500+ albums.
I used to buy music online weekly.
I have not bought a SINGLE track priced over .99 and I won’t resume buying music ANYWHERE until there’s a flat price model again.
I don’t NEED music, I like it, and morons like Middlebronfman are doing everything in their power to discourage me from being a consumer.
Good job, azzhat. Starve yourself into oblivion.
73790 items, 206.8 days, 385.83GB
thats just music.
iTunes purchases this year. 5 albums. I used to buy ten a month.
Music in general has SUCKED for a while now.
Yep. I hadn’t bought music in a decade.
And then the 99 cent iTunes tracks came online, and I started buying music again – lots of it!
But since most of the tracks I now look up are priced at $1.29, I buy almost no music anymore.
There’s something compelling about a 99 cent item, but it loses its attractiveness when over a dollar.
My Theory:
30 cents seems like such a ridiculously small amount.
But when one has a budget for music, and the price of that music suddenly rises by 1/3, that means one can buy a third less music within their budget.
So one becomes more cautious with their purchasing habits, and soon one is paralysed with caution, and just doesn’t buy any music anymore.
I doubt the music industry leeches will figure this out.
It’s pretty basic stuff really.
Do a survey of 3000 people, ask them how much is the maximum they would pay to download a song or movie to buy.
Next take the data, analyse it, whichever demographic has the highest % and that figure of buying sweetspot and distinct point of difference and then create a digital and offline targeted marketing strategy and promote the he’ll out of it.
He skrewed himself with the $1.29 pricing. His logic:
“instead of selling 20 million songs at 99c each, i can sell 3 million songs at $1.29 – Isn’t 1.29 more than .99? i think it is.”
^ the above is the reason they should sack him. (i’m surprised they havent already)
and to reiterate: Jobs is ALWAYS right. .99 is below the concious spending point. if you price it higher, then it raises a light every time someone goes to purchase
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We shold make steve jobs the president – maybe things would finally go right.