Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
Highest revenues ever for the Cupertino-based company, with $5.7Bn (“one for the records” according to Jobs). #
More than 14M iPods sold during the holiday quarter—that’s 100 iPods per minute. #
Over 850M songs sold at the iTMS (which is now holding 83% of the digital music marketshare) and 8M videos sold since they were added in [...]
For curiosity’s sake—XM vs Sirius: how many subscribers so far? 6M for XM (2.7M new subscribers this year). 3.3M for Sirius with 2.1M new arrivals this year. (“This year” == 2005, we’re still in ‘05 mode.)
As much as we sympathize with Samsung’s efforts, we can’t help but notice they’re having some misconceptions as to what it takes to reign the portable audio market. (Lest we forget, it was only last year when they publicly vowed they’ll grab the #1 spot from Apple in the MP3 players department by 2007.) Peter [...]
How couldn’t it be with almost 20M tracks sold? The previous record was 9.5M, and it happened just a week earlier. According to Billboard’s report:
A look inside the numbers shows just how unprecedented a week it was for the download business:
Before the week ending January 1, 2006, the record for the most downloads sold in [...]
Will we be seeing a 1GB Nano early next year? AppleInsider’s sources think so. Estimated price-point: $149.
Also: 100k Nanos sold each day.
2005: Music sales down 8%: that’s 2003-levels (and 4% lower than 2004). And we didn’t have a considerable digital music market back then (though this market too, shows signs of slowing down). That’s what you get for treating music lovers like criminals.
UPDATE: Cf: Do you hear what I hear? It’s the sound of the CD [...]
To the surprise of no one, MP3 players are hot: more than one in five US consumers plan to buy an MP3 player in the next three months (22%, up from 13% last year). 14% of consumers expressed interest on portable multimedia devices (read: video functionality).
Music stores brand awareness is an iTunes & Napster game: “American downloaders aged 12 and older are nearly equally as likely to be aware of Napster 2.0 and iTunes on a top-of-mind basis (31% vs. 27%, respectively); when prompted with actual brand names, more than four out of five (79%) of downloaders recognize the Napster [...]
Sony updates their flash models’ names to something humans can remember: about freakin’ time. So now:
NW-E407 → Walkman Core
NW-E307 → Walkman Circ
NW-E107 → Walkman Bean
I hope other companies follow that way too—if the product’s name is stupid, how are the people supposed to discuss it?
iPod mini fans continue to make the news: refusing to go Nano, there’s a bunch of people buying the Mini and paying a premium for it.