iTunes sales 'collapsing'
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Digital flatline looks ominous for music labels The leading DRM digital download service, Apple's iTunes, has experienced a collapse in sales revenues this year according to analyst company Forrester Research.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - NBC Universal's pullout from the iTunes online store is more of a loss for Apple and points to fierce resistance among media companies to potential Apple dominance of online video sales, an industry analyst said. On Friday, Apple announced it won't sell NBC TV shows for the upcoming television season after NBC's decision not to renew its iTunes contract. Apple explained that NBC wanted to increase its wholesale price for each episode by so much that Apple would have had to charge $4.99 per episode instead of the current rate of $1.99 for all videos on the site. Apple wouldn't agree to that price change. Shows from ABC, CBS, and News Corp.'s FOX and The CW, plus 50 cable networks, are available on iTunes for the flat rate. The incident reflects how poorly the iTunes video store has done relative to the iTunes music store, said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. "It shows how paltry and uninfluential the video side of the iTunes house is," he said. Few major music labels could similarly afford to pull out of iTunes, which dominates the online music industry. iTunes does make up the bulk of the online video resale market, but the market is small. Because the segment is still budding, many of the media companies are resisting Apple's attempt to dominate the video market as it does the online music business, he said. Forrester expects the online video resale business to generate about $300 million this year with iTunes taking in most of that. He estimates that NBC will bring in about $60 million from iTunes video sales this year. The loss of that revenue would be "not that big of a cost if it helps them undermine Apple's monopoly aspirations in the video world," McQuivey said. In the meantime, NBC is building a new platform for watching shows on its own Web site for free with paid advertising. NBC has already sold its online advertising inventory for the upcoming season, which represents revenue it won't have to share with Apple. Revenue from that service is likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in a few short years, McQuivey said. The rift with NBC is more damaging to Apple than to NBC, he said, because Apple is pushing several video products, including the Apple TV, the iPhone, and video iPods. While other big content providers are probably cheering NBC's decision, they're unlikely to follow suit, McQuivey said. They may, however, use the incident to continue to push Apple to allow variable pricing. So far, Apple has insisted on a flat rate for all videos. Media companies would prefer to be able to charge more for exclusives or season finales, he said.
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Hold onto your hard-earned for just a few weeks more Apple is planning to drop the prices of the iPhone and iPod line within the next month or two - perhaps at a rumoured late February announcement - a Mac enthusiast site has climed.â¦
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Global sales of recorded music fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2003, according to figures released Monday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
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Physical CD sales continue to drop, but sales of digital music are surging, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Digital music sales increased by 49 percent to 417 million.
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InfoWorld - NBC Universal&#39;s pullout from the iTunes online store is more of a loss for Apple and points to fierce resistance among media companies to potential Apple dominance of online video sales, an industry analyst said.
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Science & environment: Â· Apple announces UK sale date for Â£269 gadgetÂ· Rural customers face network problems
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Apple's price drop may look like a preemptive holiday strike, but is it really the result of struggling sales figures?
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Sony positions itself to squeeze Apple The newspapers were full of stories during 2004 about how Microsoft or RealNetworks or Napster were going to knock Apple's iTunes off its perch, and time and time again, nothing really happened. Now we have the reverse.â¦
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Business & money: Official data reveals a worse-than-expected fall in retail sales last month
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Global sales of recorded music slid 1.3 percent in the first half of 2004, but the rate of decline was slower than in previous years, a leading industry group said Thursday.
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Apple has announced that it will drop prices on its DRM-free AAC downloads to $0.99, the same price as all other single-song downloads. Amazon responded by giving its affiliates a 20% cut of all sales.
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Apple have announced that their iTunes store has crashed through the 200 million song download mark, a mere five months since we reported on their breaking the 100 million milestone.
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Real Network's iTunes Price Cutting Bags 1 Million Sales  Real Network's recent price cutting of iPod compatible song downloads may not be bringing profit to the company, but it is cutting into the iTunes market as well as carving their own song download market before Microsoft enters the picture. Real has ...
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Although the record companies raked in $2.9 billion in revenue from digital music sales in the past year -- up 40 percent -- the collapsing CD market is dragging them down.
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c51182)  has announced the addition of Apple Inc. Q2 06 Quarterly Review to their  offering.  Apple Posted the first ever unit sales decline in the history of its  popular digital music player; the iPod.
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Sony's three-year effort to beat Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store is over. The company will shutter its Connect music store and adopt Windows Media DRM.