The Story Set Straight On iTunes and CD Sales
12.22.06 - 01:43pm
Approximately six hundred million CD’s were sold in 2005 - about six billion songs. Itunes sold around 525 million songs, up from last year, 67%. CD’s are obviously way outselling the iTunes music store, but this doesn’t necessarily mean iTunes is going downhill. The glitch in all this, as reported by Andrew Kantor from USA Today, is CD sales. CD sales, even way outselling any other market, were still down 25 percent. What this means is that iTunes is not going downhill the music industry is going downhill.
Kantor writes that “And the elephant in the room, which you never see reported in these stories: Illegal downloads. According to Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, one of the few companies tracking these things, more than one billion songs are traded over file-sharing networks every month.”
Basically, the reason iTunes doesn’t have more sales is because people want their music without the restrictions that iTunes and the like put on the music. As Kantor says”They don’t want to have to match their music store with their music player any more than they want to have to match their brands of gasoline with their brands of car.” So people are buying CD’s instead where they can play their music anytime, anywhere and yes - share with friends.
The reason CD sales are down 25%, is the illegal sharing of music files. Kantor speaking with Garland writes “Garland uttered perhaps the most important phrase in this whole discussion: “The pirate market — if we considered that a market — would command better than 90% of the online marketplace.”
Kantor writes “the music industry needs to change, or things will probably get worse.” If the music industry continues to put restrictions on the music and not allow the consumers to play music they legally buy, where and when they want to, on whatever device they want to, than the consumer will continue to get their music through whatever means allow them to play it without restrictions. Even if this means obtaining the music illegally. He reminds us that trying to hold onto old ways of doing things never works and if the music industry continues to attempt to monopolize the technology, sales will get worse.
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