iTunes sales Collapsing
Posted December 12, 2006 — in Music News
The Register reports Apple’s iTunes has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst co Forrester Research.
While the iTunes service saw healthy growth for much of the period, since January the monthly rev has fallen by 65%, with the average transaction size falling 17%.
And it isn’t just Apple’s problem. Nielsen Soundscan has grimmer news for prospective
digital download services, indicating three consecutive quarters of flat or declining revs for the sector as a whole.
“ITunes won’t save the music business, or Apple,” analyst
Josh Bernoff wrote in the report.
No Recovery
In 2005, iTunes sales dropped after Christmas before rising “significantly’ in May. That recovery didn’t materialize this year, Forrester said.
The report also found that most music stored on iPods isn’t purchased from iTunes. Apple sells about 20 iTunes songs for each iPod purchased, even though the devices can store hundreds or thousands of songs.
WOW…..
Comment by brandon — December 12, 2006 @ 1:09 pm
The Register used the word “collapse,” not Forrester. Although digital growth is flattening, collapse was a very poor choice of words and was picked up by other newspapers.
Comment by Glenn — December 12, 2006 @ 1:44 pm
Folks are tiring of Apple’s DRM, though. I know of people other than myself who won’t pay for iTunes downloads for the simple reason we can’t burn them to CD to play in our cars, for example. Why spend $9.99 for something you can only listen to on your iPod, when you can spend $12.99 for something you can listen to everywhere, including your iPod?
As of now, I have approximately 11,000 songs on my iPod, approximately 30 of which were purchased on iTunes. No more, excepting those occasions when folks may give me iTunes gift cards, which I don’t bother asking for.
That’s just a personal anecdote, but I’m hardly unique in that outlook.
Comment by mondogarage — December 12, 2006 @ 4:51 pm
I think when the iTunes Store first opened up people ran there to buy individual songs they haven’t heard in awhile. (Sales up) They wanted “that one song” in digital format for their music collection. Now that the Store has been open for awhile I think most of the public has finished searching the Store over for all those old songs. I think we are at the point of waiting for new songs that are worthy of a download. (Sales down)
Comment by gregroks — December 13, 2006 @ 5:20 am
I never understood the hold Apple had on people. Somehow they’ve managed to cultivate this trendy, hip image with the walking lifestyles. Meanwhile the failure rate on many of their products is ridiculous.
Everyone I know (as in 100%) that owns an iPod has had to repair or replace it, sometimes more than once. Their notebooks don’t fare much better. Off the top of my I can think of seven people I know with iBooks or Powerbooks and five of those have had to have repairs made.
Meanwhile I chug along, problem-free, with my un-hip Creative ZEN and well worn PC’s.
Comment by DD — December 13, 2006 @ 9:18 am
For what it’s worth, the *inside* of the screen of my 60 GB iPod Photo (pre-video) broke, and I can’t read the bottom left quadrant of the screen. There are no cracks in the exterior. Apple wouldn’t do shit about it, and returned it to me citing “owner responsibility”. It was about 6 months old at the time. I nearly always play it on shuffle, so it doesn’t keep me from using it.
However, what it *did* do was guarantee that the mp3 player I just bought for my wife for Xmas was *not* an Apple product, and guaranteed further that I would never ever spend a dime on another product made by Apple, including iTunes gift cards.
The hard drive on this iPod also locks up at an alarming rate, though resetting it is not that difficult.
Comment by mondogarage — December 13, 2006 @ 11:07 am
Mondogarage: I just want to point out that you can, in fact, burn CD’s in iTune’s. The function is in the iTune’s program. On top of that, you can import your .mp3’s into your iTune’s library (simply points at the file on your computer) and you have the best of both worlds to burn any downloaded iTune’s formatted songs along with your .mp3 formatted songs onto one CD if you’d like. (as a side note, I’m a Windows user…
)
Comment by Scott — December 14, 2006 @ 10:55 am