Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Billions, Schmillions

Greetings from France. It's nice to be in a country that has an even lower market share for Apple products than the United States. People are just so much more enlightened here. More on this later, but first I have to get this out of the way:

So Apple claims to have sold 3 Billion songs via the iTunes Music Store. It's unclear how many of these are giveaways, and how many represent actual sales, but whatever. Those are the numbers they're pushing, so it's what we have to work with. The Mac web and their willing accomplices in the mainstream tech press are falling all over themselves to report this "achievement".

I don't see why this is a big deal. On the excellent Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus, I've used elaborate charts like this one to show that iTunes has peaked and is clearly dying:


But some of you still don't get it. So here are the only numbers you really need to know:

Number of Zunes sold: Over 1,000,0000
Number of songs sold on the iTunes music store that will play on the Zune: ZERO
Number of songs sold on the iTunes music store that will play on any portable player other than the iPod: ZERO

Look at this chart for proof (click on the image for a larger version):


It's only a matter of time until Apple's feeble efforts in music sink the company into irrelevancy. The number speak for themselves. Obviously.

5 comments:

FMD said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

You're really disingenious, Fake Paul. I think that AAC DRM-free tracks will play on the Zune just fine. :-)

You should know that ANY country in the world has a lower market share for Apple products than the US. But fear not, even in Europe the market share is increasing and Apple will eventually build a few retail stores in France, Germany, etc. In France, Mac sales increased by 37% in 2005 and Apple was number one in the education market with a 19.5% share. Last year Apple's edu share increased to 21.7%. The Mac market share is now 2.8% in Germany and above 3 percent in France. The iPod is also gaining share over there. We could do without your misplaced sarcasm.

Not Paul said...

anonymous: What a nice name. "anonymous". Is that Greek?

Apple doesn't release numbers for its spyware-ridden DRM-free tracks, so I doubt they've sold any at all, obviously.

Oh, and the word you're looking for is " disingenuous", not "disingenious". There's this thing called a "dictionary". Buy one.

Anonymous said...

Even after clicking on the "iTunes downloads per day" chart, the larger version is still so small you can barely see the dates involved, so you miss the punchline. (But then, this may be the result of the obvious inferiority of Safari's rendering.) Other than that, keep up the good work, FPT.

Anonymous said...

Remember to pick up the cheese and the duck liver pate, Paul. And don't forget the wine. You can miss on the baguettes, though - that French bread goes stale in about a day (rather like the iPhone).