Petteri Pyyny
5 May 2003 14:32
The sales figures for Apple's recently launched online music store are almost unbelievable for many in the industry and according to Apple, this is just the beginning.
Apple launched its online music store, iTunes, a week ago and already claims whopping one million sold audio tracks. Each track costs $0.99 (except when user buys a full album) and tracks can be burned on CD, transferred to Apple's own portable audio player, iPod (which itself is already a culture icon), and the store has a selection of over 200,000 tracks. And to put the sales figures into perspective -- the service is only available for Mac users. No Windows, no Linux -- only Macs allowed.
Only complaints seem to relate to the fact that the service is almost too easy to use -- you wont even notice when you've already shopped audio tracks worth of tens of dollars. Apple also reported that it has sold over 20,000 iPod portable audio players over the last weekend in the U.S. and has received over 110,000 orders for the player.
It seriously looks like Apple has finally figured out something that record labels just couldn't understand -- offer a legal, relatively cheap way to purchase (virtually) unrestricted digital audio tracks from a massive audio catalog and you have a winner.
It is rumoured that Apple has plans to launch a Windows version of the service later this year, but company hasn't confirmed the rumours yet. Company has announced that it will extend the audio catalog to include 500,000 songs by end of the year. The audio tracks sold are encoded by using AAC format, which is one of the standardized audio formats within the MPEG-4 standard.
Source: News.com