Selling music online

[Charles Martin]

> From: Steven Rogers <srogers1 at austin.rr.com>
> Speaking of that - anyone heard how the second month went?

For reasons I can't divulge, I'm in CONSTANT contact with people on 
both ends of the iTMS about this.

>  I hope it
> continues to go well and drive home the point that people will buy
> music if a) the content doesn't suck and b) the distribution medium and
> rights are reasonable.
>
As you may have heard, the president of CDBaby (a small indie 
entrerprise) recently attended an Apple discussion and took copious 
notes, which he foolishly published. After being reminded (NOT 
threatened) by his friends at Apple (NOT the lawyers) that the meeting 
was supposed to be confidential, he took the details of the notes down 
voluntarily (I'm stressing this because there has been a LOT of GROSSLY 
inaccurate reporting about this).

Anyway, the point is that his numbers agree with mine, which I found 
very reassuring. The iTunes Store has yet to complete it's second full 
month of operation, so there's no stats on how "the second month went," 
but this CAN be said:

* 3.5 million songs sold so far.
* About 500,000/week average.
* About 45% as full album sales.

... and keep in mind that the iTMS is at present still limited to 
people running OS X 10.1.5 or later, in the United States, running 
iTunes 4, who want to take advantage of the service. We figure that's 
about 2.5 million people at the moment, though I'm sure that's growing 
fast.


> It would be really neat if there were places to buy or download
> soundtrack music appropriate for iMovie - stuff that you could buy
> that's licensed to distribute as a background in to your own movies.

I'm delighted to tell you that the AAC songs purchased from the iTMS 
*include* the right to use them as background music in your iPhoto 
slideshows or iMovie creations **FOR PERSONAL USE** ie non-commercial.

If you are a .Mac member, you also have a *HUGE* treasure trove of 
royalty-free background music available for exactly this same purpose 
(non-commercial/personal use) on your iDisk.

You might also look into a couple of products that are supposed to help 
you CREATE custom soundtracks for your iMovie etc projects -- 
SmartSound Movie Maestro (amateur use) and Smartsound Sonicfire Pro 
(professional use). I recently attended a demo and was impressed at the 
ease-of-use. You can find out more at http://www.smartsound.com.

_Chas_

"[Commercial] radio is absolutely the enemy of music. They  are my 
sworn and mortal enemy, and I will have nothing to do with them." -- 
Elvis Costello, March 2003