Music fans in the UK, France and Germany downloaded over 800,000 tracks from Apple Computer’s iTunes online music store in its first week of operations in Europe, the company has announced.
In Britain alone, 450,000 songs were downloaded from iTunes since June 15th, when the service launched in Europe.
“iTunes’ success is indicative that there is space in the European market for a new downloading service to come in,” Rebecca Jennings, a Forrester Research UK entertainment industry analyst, told NewsFactor.
Major Player in Tight Market
With such a strong start, iTunes already has staked its claim to be a major player in Europe’s highly competitive music-download market. Napster (news – web sites) launched a European music-download service last month, and Sony (NYSE: SNE – news) is due to enter the market very shortly.
The growth in competition in Europe has been cited as a key reason for the US$38 million merger, announced June 22nd, between UK-based music downloading service OD2 and Seattle, Washington-based digital-media firm Loudeye.
“In the UK alone, iTunes sold more than 450,000 songs in the last week — 16 times as many as OD2, its closest competitor,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs (news – web sites) says in a statement.
iTunes vs. OD2
“When I looked at music download sites that are based on OD2, I found that they tend to be more complex than iTunes,” Rebecca Jennings, a Forrester Research UK entertainment industry analyst, told NewsFactor. OD2 acts as the back end for services provided in Europe by MSN, Tiscali and MTV.
iTunes is prepared to accept very small payments, because it wants to build its customer base. “OD2 does not allow you to buy just one track,” Jennings pointed out. “You have to pre-pay a minimum amount before you can listen to any music.
“But iTunes is much easier to use,” Jennings notes. “You can just buy one track if you want, without making any financial commitment to buying other tracks. So this means you can test iTunes out, which is something that is important to consumers.”
However, Jennings warned that any music-download service seeking to penetrate the continental European market needs to be prepared to be flexible with regard to payment mechanisms. “iTunes requires people to pay with a credit card,” she said. “But in central Europe, a lot of people don’t have credit cards — they just have debit cards. And in many cases, these debit cards do not work on the Internet; they can only be used at the point of sale in a store or at the bank. European consumers often want to be able to use alternative payment methods on the Internet, such as PayPal.”
Top Artists
Top-selling artists in the iTunes Europe lineup include the Pixies, Alicia Keys, Anastacia and Herbert Gronemeyer. The Pixies released a brand new song, “Bam Thwok,” exclusively on iTunes last week.
iTunes offers music fans a choice of over 700,000 songs to download at 79 UK pence a track (US$1.44). Tracks then can be downloaded onto a computer, copied onto a CD, or played on an iPod digital-music player. The record labels are hoping that services like iTunes and Napster will convert illegal Internet file-sharers into legitimate online customers and reverse the decline in recorded-music sales.
Apple’s U.S. iTunes store has sold over 85 million tracks since launching in April 2003. By contrast, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) says that download sales for all industry-backed UK services topped 500,000 in the first five and a half months of 2004.
Unfortunately the European stores still don’t have anything close to the selection available in the USA store. I’m buying most of my stuff from the US store, since it is cheaper and a lot more choice. Especially if you follow a few of the US TV series. I use iTunes Gift Cards from http://iTunes-GiftCards.com/FAQ as they have been very good to me. Helpful fast and reliable.