Eliot Van Buskirk

iTunes "Sales Collapse" Stories Questioned

By analyzing a sample of credit and debit card usage, Forrester Research extrapolated that iTunes sales dropped 65% between January and June of this year. However, iTunes sales are still increasing overall from year to year. Forrester’s Josh Bernoff explains how the press got it wrong in this blog post: "Now for the record, iTunes […]
Image may contain Disk and Dvd

Itunes_2
By analyzing a sample of credit and debit card usage, Forrester Research extrapolated that iTunes sales dropped 65% between January and June of this year. However, iTunes sales are still increasing overall from year to year. Forrester's Josh Bernoff explains how the press got it wrong in this blog post:

"Now for the record, iTunes sales are not collapsing.
Our credit card transaction data shows a real drop between the Januarypost-holiday peak and the rest of the year, but with the number oftransactions we counted it's simply not possible to draw thisconclusion... as we pointed out in the report [his emphases]."

So the point was actually that iTunes sells a lot more songs right after the holiday season, indicating that new iPod owners tend to buy more music than people who have owned them for awhile. Still, Apple stock dropped 3%, possibly due to all of the news that was drawn from that part of the report.

(via digitalmusicnews)