iTunes hits 25 billion sales

Apple has announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 25 billion songs from the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com), making it the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store. The purchaser of the 25 billionth song, Phillip Lüpke, will receive a €10,000 iTunes Gift Card. The service sells an average of 15,000 songs per minute.

AC/DC join the digital age

Australian rockers AC/DC have agreed to let their entire catalogue, including individual tracks, be sold on Apple’s iTunes as digital downloads, after long refusing, Fellow refuseniks  including The Beatles, Kid Rock and Metallica who had all previously joined iTunes, leaving just Garth Brooks as the only major recording artist to continue to  hold out. 

AC/DC’s catalogue will be available in every country where iTunes Store operates. Additionally, there are two special digital compilations, one that includes all 16 studio albums,and another that has those plus four live albums.

Pandora and Apple top the digital charts

Apple and Pandora have topped a new survey of digital platforms, with Apple's iTunes remaining the dominant  player in  the paid for music download service sector, with a 64 percent share of the market in the second quarter of 2012. Amazon's MP3 Store comes a distant second with 16 percent, and no other purveyor of paid downloads exceeds 5 percent. Google Play, eMusic, Zune Music Pass and all of the others combined only account for 20 percent. The NPD survey also said that  50 percent of US internet users were aware of Pandora’s free ad-supported radio service, and a third of them also knew that Pandora offered a paid subscription service. Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio had 25 percent consumer awareness, followed by Spotify with 19 percent.

Another label quits Spotify

Another heavy metal has said it is quitting streaming music platform Spotify. Prosthetic Records has followed Century Media and Metal Blade in pulling its content from the Spotify service, with its co-owner EJ Johantgen telling LA Weekly "there [does] not appear to be an upside" to being part of the Spotify party and that payouts are "fractions of pennies". An online debate about Spotify's payments to both labels and songwriters has been initiated by self-releasing indie-folk outfit Uniform Motion based around the royalties they earn on their sound recordings (as both label and recording artist) rather than their publishing (as songwriters). Posting a long blog about the economics of being a DIY artist, they provided some interesting insights into what artists can make from the various digital services - both download and mail-order - and streaming - and the blog led to an online debate comparing the money artists can make 'per download' via services such as iTunes and 'per stream' models such as Spotify. Spotify responded by pointing out the diffence between the two models and saying that they has paid out $100 million to rights owners, that they are the second largest source of digital revenue for European labels. Interestingly, Uniform Motion has since noted on their blog that their problem with Spotify and other streaming services isn't so much how much they get paid per stream, but rather how that fee relates to what the streaming firms earn for ad sales and subscriptions. They say: "What we dislike about Spotify, is the lack of transparency in their business model. With Apple, it's simple. They take 30%. With Spotify, we don't know if we're getting a fair deal or not".