Blogcritics: Comments on Sales Still Strong for Apple Music Store - Europe Next

Comment by Phillip Winn

Wed, 14 May 2003 16:32:16 EDT

Mark, you're right. I'm sure many people have mentally segmented the potential market for this into many different stacks, but it certainly includes people who want to do the right thing as they see it, people who don't want to hassle with kazaa et al for technical reasons, people who've always thought getting music on a computer was something you had to be a geek to do, and many more. Still, several of those are far more pronounced in the Mac world, so I think Windows users are now seeing something very familiar to Mac user, but in reverse. Is it really worth the increased cost of development to come up with a Windows version of this, given the relatively small gain in market size that will likely result? I'm teasing, slightly. It will obviously be "worth it" even if the 30x bigger market only buys the same amount of music. A million a week ain't bad!

Comment by Mark Saleski

Wed, 14 May 2003 15:53:48 EDT

no, i wouldn't expect the increase to be linear. the other thing that we haven't talked about though are the users (this would include me) who aren't all that interested in messing around with things like kazaa/gnutella. if it was very simple to use it wouldn't surprise me if new users are drawn in.

Comment by Phillip Winn

Wed, 14 May 2003 15:42:41 EDT

My experience with Apple users is that the average Mac user is far more likely than the average computer user to "do the right thing," which is essentially what this service enables people to do. Software piracy has always been far more rampant for Windows than for the Mac, and Mac users are used to paying not just for everything they use, but paying more. That's a generalization, of course, but I believe it holds pretty true overall, and I think the incredibly high sales from iTMS demonstrates this. Obviously there are dishonest Mac users, and honest Windows users, but I wouldn't expect opening up the service from the 3% of potential customer that use OS X to 90% of by including Windows users would result in 30 million dollars in sales every eight days, do you? Apple knows their market well.

Comment by Mark Saleski

Wed, 14 May 2003 12:41:25 EDT

and just think...that's coming from a tiny subset (apple) of all computer users. just imagine what could happen with a cheaper download price being made available on the windows platform. it might even be enough money to make up for all of the lost dough that the riaa is wasting on their legal hooey and webcrawler shinanigans... nah, probably not.