sellthekids says: "and to dispell the idea that single song sales will kill the album, read this link that says of the first million tracks downloaded, 50% were albums. 50%!"

Since an album generally has about 12 songs on it, that means about 12 times as many singles have been downloaded compared with entire albums. Right?

Say there are 100 songs downloaded and 50% are downloaded as albums. That would mean about 4 or 5 albums and 50 singles were downloaded.

I think.

That doesn't dispell the idea to me.

Okay, according to the article that sell linked, 1 million songs have been downloaded.

I think there was a lot of worry that people were going to just buy singles, and not albums... So, saying that 500,000 songs were sold as albums and 500,000 were sold as singles is a strong argument that album sales are solid..... If those percentages were lopsided more dramatically, it would give people pause to go "Uh oh, they're only buying singles!" (then again, what's the problem with that? i dunno)

So bands like Radiohead, etc., who are only allowing their songs to be sold as a full package seems to be a bit lame..

Charlesworth's astute mathematics sent me off on a rant.



I wanted to assimilate a couple of articles that I've seen recently, too...

couple of things that i have been thinking about....

1) 42K in online album sales is a winner, no matter how you count it. think about it - that is ONLY Mac users, no PC users. clearly it speaks well that not only can an online service sell songs, but people can and will download full CDs...kinda like Napster, Kaaza, Grokster, etc have been proving all along.

2) music downloads are the future. 'nuff said, move on.

no seriously, i do feel that way, but i want to explain what i see as happening.

when i was getting my business degree, i was required to take a "capstone" class that kinda ties all the business classes into one - marketing, accounting, finance, management, etc. it was a great class, the one i enjoyed most in my 5 years of college. anyway, in this class you spend a good amount of time doing "business cases", which is to say, the prof gives you real world companies and you dissect where they are and what might be helping/hindering them in achieving their goal of "increasing shareholder value". one of the things that always came up in these cases was how firms reacted when the market changed. the companies' reactions are based on their market position, their industry age, their sunk costs, etc. in examing these business cases, lots of times it was technology that caused the market to move; nothing can be more evident in the world of MP3s and online music.

the music industry is a mature industry; to use the terminology from my capstone class, they are a "cash cow" (the four categories are Dog, Problem Child, Cash Cow, Rising Star.) cash cows are entrenched industries who are concerned with protecting market share. cash cows have enormous sunk costs and large infrastructures, such as office buildings, people, plants, stores, etc. cash cows are often slow to move on new trends; they are conservative b/c they have the most invested in their industry and thus the most to lose. cash cows are often faced with changes that offer them two choices: (1)assimilate/change and risk current profits, (2)stay entrenched and reap current profits at the possible expense of future profits.

the music industry of course chose the second and who can blame them? they have invested hundreds of millions in the infrastructure that keeps the industry going. to them it wasn't an option to move to a system that might not need CD pressing plants, or store front sales systems, or vast armies of A&R people. the labels unfortunately bet the farm that they could keep the status quo and would still make above average returns, and for the mid-to-late 90s, they did. but since about 2000, their industry has rapidly changed. technology has become very widespread and a new means of distrubtion (and new distributers) are entering their market. why? b/c unlike previously, the cost of entry into music distribution is much, much lower. no plants, no trucks, no stores, no slotting fees. Apple via iTunes has been able, in less than 6 months, to put themselves in a position that rivals the labels, even though in theory they don't compete.

anyway, the world has moved, the genie is out of the bottle and music distribution is not going back to the system of CDs in music stores any more than it is going back to vinyl records. the points above are to support my feelings that no matter if albums sales suffer or single become the new music sales format, the industry is changing. fight it all you want, but it is too late: you are just like that little kid trying to keep high tide from destroying your sand castle: give up, b/c nature stops for no man.

another reason to use macs and iTunes and otherwise sell your soul to Cupertino.

G5!!!!!!!



oh blessed lords of cash money, grant me my wish for credit expansion.

rock.

J

Apple accused of cheating over G5 benchmarks
By Tony Smith
Posted: 24/06/2003 at 15:53 GMT


Benchmark results cited by Apple at the launch of its Power Mac G5 desktops yesterday have already come under fire for seeming to not only tweak the Mac test system to improve its performance beyond anything an ordinary user might experience, but crippling rival systems to deliver below-par average user performance.

The tests described by Apple CEO Steve Jobs were conducted on the company's behalf ("under contract") by VeriTest. The benchmarks used are SPEC CPU 2000 integer and floating-point tests. Apple asked VeriTest to compare a pre-release a dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with a Dell Precision 650 workstation based on twin 3.06GHz Intel Xeon CPUs and a Dell Dimension 8300 based on a 3GHz Pentium 4.

The Dell's were running Red Hat Linux 9.0, the G5 Mac OS X 10.2.7. The test software was compiled using GCC 3.3 and NAGware Fortran 95.

VeriTest recorded SPECint base score of 800, 889 and 836 for the G5, 8300 and 650, respectively. The equivalent SPECfp base scores were 840, 693 and 646. So the G5 out-performs the other machines, yes?

Well, so says Apple, but a closer look at VeriTest's documentation, freely available from its web site, suggests otherwise.

Certainly SPEC figures published on the SPEC web site do, as Register readers noted, along with readers at a number of web sites today. The corresponding SPECint and SPECfp base Dell-provided results for the 650 are 1089 and 1053. Equivalent figures for the Dimension 8300 are not available.

That puts Apple's figures in a new light. On one hand we have figures that suggest the 2GHz G5 outperforms the 3GHz Xeon in certain benchtests, and on the other we have numbers that show the exact opposite. What gives?

Firstly, Dell's own figures were calculated using different compilers and host operating system: Windows XP Pro, Intel's own C++ and Fortran compilers, and the MicroQuill SmartHeap Library 6.01. Secondly, the compiler used by VeriTest, GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86. Thirdly, VeriTest seems to have adjusted the test hardware to favour the G5. Again, all the details are there in the documentation.

VeriTest admits it used an Apple-supplied tool to adjust the G5 processor's registers "to enable Memory Read Bypass" and "to enable the maximum of eight hardware prefetch streams and disable software-based pre-fetching". The company also installed a "high performance, single-threaded malloc library... geared for speed rather than memory efficiency". That, says VeriTest, "makes it unsuitable for many uses".

We'd guess these are hardly standard system configurations.

VeriTest also says it tweaked the Dell boxes. For example, when it came to the SPECint and SPECfp rate tests, it disabled HyperThreading, though enabled it for the base SPECint and SPECfp tests. While the compilers were set to optimise code for the Pentium 4, SSE 2 instructions were not used to speed floating point maths operations, only SSE 1 instructions were enabled. VeriTest provides no clear rationale for these choices.

Without that rationale, both VeriTest and Apple are today widely being accused of cheating, and not only by x86 fans eager to see the G5 knocked a peg or two back down the CPU performance ladder. To be fair, at least Apple and VeriTest tell you what they've done, which is more than can be said for the vendor-supplied figures on SPEC's web site. What tweaks have vendors applied to boost their own scores? But they should also say why.

The VeriTest test appears to be an attempt to get the apples/oranges comparison as close as they possibly can, but looking deeper suggests that they have failed to do so.

As we noted in our story on Apple's G5 introduction, we await independent, real world tests of the new Power Mac G5's performance. Only then will Mac users - and everyone else, for that matter - get a truly worthwhile comparison between platforms.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/31405.html

Attempts by Apple Computer to launch a European version of its online "Music Store", where people can download individual songs, has been held up until next year by disputes between record companies and their artists over licensing.

The delay could mean more problems for the record companies, which face a growing tide of online piracy with the increase in high-speed "broadband" connections in Europe, and frustration for Apple, which has seen 5 million tracks sold at 99 cents each through its US-only online "iTunes Music Store" since its launch eight weeks ago.

In Europe, though, different artists can have different arrangements in each country over how much they are paid for a digital download - if such clauses are in their contract at all. That has caused headaches for Apple, which wants to take advantage of its momentum in the US to roll the program out in the rest of the world.

Pascal Cagni, vice-president of Apple's European operations, said yesterday: "In Europe the legal environment [for licensing songs for download] is more complicated than in the US, so the one-price-fits-all system that the US uses is difficult to do here. And the major labels themselves haven't sorted out their rights."

Mr Cagni declined to put a date on the timing of the launch, but insisted it would not be ready by September, contrary to some reports. One music industry source said yesterday: "I don't suspect Apple will have this in Europe until next year."

Although the five major record labels have signed internet download deals with a British company, OD2 (Online Digital Distribution) of Bristol, the number of tracks sold is not believed to approach that achieved by Apple's online store.

Both, however, are dwarfed by the number of illicit downloads carried out every day through "peer-to-peer" networks that are increasingly popular with people disenchanted with the price of CDs. Millions of tracks change hands every day through those networks, enabled by broadband connections, to the frustration of the record companies.

However, despite only being accessible to those using the company's newest operating system, Apple's iTunes Music Store has been a hit in the US. The company notes that its statistics suggest that albums are still popular: more than 46 per cent of the songs have been purchased as albums, and more than 80 per cent of the 200,000-plus songs available on the online store have been purchased at least once.

The key to its appeal seems to be simplicity. The "store" is accessed through a simple web browser-like interface to buy individual tracks for 99 cents or entire albums for $9.99, and allows people to "burn" their music on to a CD that will play normally in a car or hi-fi.

By contrast, OD2 - which has a comparable number of tracks for sale - only allows some tracks to be burned on to CD, and requires a subscription; once that expires, the downloaded tracks will not play. OD2 was not able to give a figure for the number of downloads from its system in the past eight weeks.

"The iTunes Music Store is changing the way people buy music," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, on Monday. The company is now focusing on developing a version that will be able to draw users of the more widely used Windows operating system: that is expected by the end of the year.