Digital Sales

iTunes sales are NOT plummeting! Press credibility, on the other hand . . .
http://blogs.forrester.com/devicesmedia/2006/12/itunes_sales_ar.html

I refuse to buy music over iTunes because then I'm locked into their DRM system. If some time in the future, I want to buy a Zune and listen to my iTunes purchased music on it, I'll have to burn it to a CD and then rip it into MP3. I'd rather just go to the store, buy a CD, and have the music without any DRM.

If there were a single DRM system that was guaranteed to be supported by all peripheral manufacturers, I'd probably be willing to buy albums online.

On the other hand, I have no problem buying games through Steam.

When I can buy losless drmless format from itunes, they'll have my business. I think a bunch of people don't like being tied to some things.


My guess is when people can't play songs purchased from itunes in winamp(without extra work) they get discouraged from buying there again. Why bother when you can just get the cd and not have to.

As a retailer of 'real' dvds and cds, this is music to my ears. Digital distribution is like the boogeyman to small brick and mortar stores. Big chains like Walmart and Bestbuy wont be affected because eventually, they'll have online distribution, too. But the small Mom and Pop stores will dissapear because its almost impossible to compete.

I never understood why people are willing to pay for 'air' instead of paying a few bucks more and actually having something to hold on to.

How do people plan on sharing music with thier kids/grandkids when they get older? Instead of rifling through and box of albums, tapes, or cds (and the memories that come with them) you'll just email your DRM password to the youngsters with a url. Its not the same.

The decline in sales seems very reasonable to me. The purchases on iTunes are one-time purchases; you find the song, you buy it, and you never buy it again. Taking that into consideration, during the initial launch of iTunes, people weren't only downloading the new releases, they were downloading older music which wasn't as easy to find or maybe that they only had on vinyl or tape and therefore couldn't rip to MP3's themselves. Once someone has had the opportunity to sufficiently explore the available library of music and has purchased what they like, that leaves only new releases for future purchases.

Out of all of the new music coming out, it's to be expected that the average listener isn't going to like everything; there will only be a few songs here or there that they wish to pick up. Therefore, as the iTunes market matures, sales are going to decline because it's going to be solely dependent on new material.

I have to say I really like digital distribution for games. Since it seems like companies have been really skimping on stuff included in the box (read: thick, full-color manuals) I don't see any disadvantage in using digital distribution. Plus it's easier. The only worry is that maybe the store would go under, like Triton. But I don't really thing Valve/Steam is going to go under any time soon.

I think a more interesting study would be, how many people who have purchased music online have then gone back to buying cd's?

The Forrester's report was pretty much crappy research. Apple has already came out and said its wrong.

I bet they don't count foreign sites like AllofMp3. Rather than online sales dropping, it's the online sales they keep track of which drop. For example, if we tracked Ford and GMs car sales but ignored Toyota's sales, we'd conclude that people were no longer buying cars as much.

I gave Direct2Drive a try, as spam-sounding as it's name is. It was simple to use, giving me the option to just download one big DVD ISO and burn a backup copy, and it allowed me to get Neverwinter Nights 2 a couple days earlier than one can usually get new releases in Canada.

I don't think that online game sales would be the 4% that iTunes had for music though.

While I enjoy thoughts of the retail industry dying in the future at the hands of the internet, it's a long, long way off yet. The old must perish and be replaced by today's and tomorrow's generation for this to happen.

The new generation of music buyers - tweens and teenagers in middle and high school right now - don't buy CDs at all and probably never will own a CD player in their lifetimes. I'm sure there will be a gradual switchover to online distribution over time as they get older.

That being said, nearly every single one of them has Limewire installed on their computers and know how to share their libraries amongst friends.

I believe this was pretty much proven to be inaccurate (The article). Besides, look at the history of this person's reporting...

Buying games and music are very different at the moment.

When you buy a game online you get *exactly* the same game that someone who walks into a shop gets, minus the packaging. Same quality of art, music and geometry and usually the same copy protection. The advantage is speed of delivery (plus, possibly, being able to re-download after a disaster) and the disadvantage is having to make your own physical backup and not getting a box/manual.

When you buy music online, with the exception of a few of the smaller labels' stores and some content from the dubious russian site, you don't get the same thing as someone buying a CD. You get lesser quality. You get locked into a particular format and a particular bitrate. And you get DRM which locks you into a particular device which in turn may lock you into a particular store. If you want to change format, bitrate or DRM then you will likely degrade quality (anyone who says that burn-and-re-rip is a valid solution please learn about lossy re-compression) and also likely be breaking the law. Fuck paying for that.

I'm happy to buy games online and I'm happy to buy DRM-free, lossless-encoded music that I can convert into whatever I want online. Anything else is taking the piss, unless it is seriously discounted to compensate.

So far, my impression of digital distribution is that it is much more advantageous to smaller independent developers rather than large publishers. The large publishers don't necessarily need online distribution to reach their customers, they already have retail. However, for the smaller guys, who can't get into the retail markets, online distribution is a life saver and helps them get the sales they normally wouldn't.

Old data, spun, and denied by Apple. Don't waste your time with this 'report'

What are the royalties of the artists(music) vs developers(games)?

I think 4% is pretty good, since people only buy the songs they like and not the whole album (I guess)

i think poeple should mind their own poeple's thing... typooooo

I would definitely 'think' digital sales for games is of a higher percentage than digital music (percentage wise for both industries).

More effort is put into games, mostly, being able to play multiplayer without hassle if you actually buy the games. More effort is needed to simply play a game you did not buy. A lot of people know how sure, and it's very easy sure, but a lot of people dont know how, the same people that use their cdrom for a beverage holder, the extra effort has effects.

Really if you dont buy music there are no loopholes to go through to use it, unlike games. Now we have digital distro on consoles, people eat that up, almost everyone has a steam account, EA has brought along EA link, a lot of other studios are going this direction...

It might be less than the amount of places you can buy music digitally sure, but at the same time, the music medium cannot be compared to a game, easiest example, i can't go to myspace.com/crysis and play the game, i can go to /band and listen to music, and everything plays mp3s... and they're small, download 5gig of data to burn, and install, then patch, and not have multiplayer, if you don't pay for games you're always losing part of the game, but not for music...

Give us higher quality downloads to buy!

People mis-spelled on that post there Mr. Gibson.

If this is the same story I read yesterday ...

The data is over a year old and the report seems to be spun very hard in an anti-DD way.

"Since the start of this year" - I thought sales from late last year / early this year were the highest because of all the people who got gift certificates or X amount of song downloads for Christmas were cashing them in, thus making late december early january the busiest time of the year. Thus making "sales look down since the beginning of the year", and also thus meaning they'll see that surge in song downloads in the next few weeks.

I wonder if Bittorrent has anything to do with it.

The last few CD's I bought were bought via iTunes. Just so much simpler that way. I'm sure this year will see a significant increase over that 4% from 2005.

Same deal with games thanks to Steam.