Everyone knows that retailers see their strongest sales during the holiday season, and thanks to a Forrester Study, we also know Apple experiences even bigger holiday-related sales swings, most likely due to the massive amount of iTunes gift certificates that get redeemed during December and January.
This year, the effect was even stronger, causing gift card redeemers to experience performance issues with the iTunes store. On Christmas day this year, activity on the iTunes music store was a full 413% higher than it was the previous year, causing error messages and 20-minute song downloads.
All of this evidence that iTunes sales is so much stronger during the holidays seems to indicate that people are more likely to give someone the gift of DRM-ed music than they are to buy it for themselves (I suspect that the people buying the gift cards are, on the whole, less technically-savvy than the people receiving them).
(via Gizmodo)
