EMI: Initial DRM-free sales results "good"

Ok Fair Use advocates, listen up. EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz has just given her initial sales report following their much ballyhooed DRM-free launch on iTunes Plus last month. The results? Well, "good" is the word she used to summarize sales. During the first week of availability, sales of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon were up 350 percent. Even now, after all the initial excitement, sales remain 272 percent higher. To a lesser degree, other EMI artists are also riding the DRM-free, download bump; even while their respective CD sales have tailed off. For example, downloads for Norah Jones' Come Away with Me are up some 24 percent while CD sales have dropped 33 percent. Still, the DRM-free tracks were launched only three weeks ago which is far too early for any kind of proper trend analysis. We also don't have any correlating data to demonstrate an increase (or decrease) in piracy -- something the record labels will likely weigh in equal importance. Things do look promising though, eh?

[Via Ars Technica]

[Rohit Kapur @ Jun 21st 2007 6:06AM]

For God's sake, change that picture!!

[Robert @ Jun 21st 2007 6:08AM]

yes please change that picture its reallly bad

[Eugene @ Jun 21st 2007 6:24AM]

HA - I beg to differ, the picture is pure genius!

[Ali @ Jun 21st 2007 11:41AM]

I was eating breakfast when I saw this...almost puked :@

[Jason @ Jun 21st 2007 6:24AM]

Holy cow! That pic is hilarious.

[daniel @ Jun 21st 2007 6:27AM]

i just threw up a little, thanks engadget.

[me @ Jun 21st 2007 6:28AM]

Please REMOVE that disgusting picture!

[strider_mt2k @ Jun 21st 2007 6:28AM]

There is no dark side of the moon, really.

-'smatter of fact it's all dark...

[zoara @ Jun 21st 2007 6:29AM]

I bet that it doesn't change piracy levels by any noticable level. Why should it? It only takes one person to put up a rip before its available (and reproduced) globally, and there's bound to be at least one person on the planet willing to put the effort into bypassing the (previous) DRM. Once that one copy is on the Internet, there's no difference between the situation with DRM and without.

[Hawkman @ Jun 21st 2007 8:25AM]

More to the point, there's always someone willing to spend a minute or two ripping the CD. Piracy is so, so easy - DRM was always pointless, because even if it's impenetrable the CDs are still out there. Dropping it on music downloads cannot be anything but a win for all sides.

[L. Cyphre @ Jun 21st 2007 6:43AM]

...I was eating you bastards.

[Thomas Trautman @ Jun 21st 2007 8:24AM]

I really find it enjoyable that people believe Apple is moving towards making music DRM-free. It's not going to happen. iPod's success is tied to iTunes success bound by DRM.

I want to see DRM to go as much as the next guy. I'll hold off on the high fives until we see EMI drop DRM from all tracks it sells regardless of the company doing the selling (ie, napster, raphasody...).

[Dahk @ Jun 21st 2007 9:06AM]

Oh gosh, you posted that at 6 AM? How do you even eat breakfast with that picture.

[Geir E @ Jun 21st 2007 9:09AM]

What i dont like that much about itunes sales is that they always sell at a fixed price. It's a vintage recording that from play.com cost $8 and from itunes a mere $20 (norwegian price). So i just bought the cd instead of on itunes.

[tekdroid @ Jun 21st 2007 9:46AM]

people never cease to amaze me.

OK, so let's buy some Norah Jones and Pink Floyd coz we can't find these rarities at my local record store.

Nor can we find anything as cheap or sounding as great as an AAC lossy file. CDs certainly don't come close. I can't download them! Stone-age technology maaan.

[Bhaal @ Jun 21st 2007 10:51AM]

Your lack of imagination disturbs me.

Most brick and morter stores tend to have things called 'closing times' and be a large distance from the individual's home relative to the distance of a computer within that home. Internet stores will ship you CDs but they tend to take p to 48 hours, itunes downloads take 3 minutes if that.

People value convenience and immediacy. Just because you don't value these things to the same extent doesn't mean that their choices are automatically rubbish.

[TIMMAH! @ Jun 21st 2007 11:40AM]

I don't get it, what's the significance of the picture? Is it to show that DRM has no teeth?

[kevin @ Jun 21st 2007 12:23PM]

Bhaal, I don't know where you live, but in the U.S., most people live near a Circuit City, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Mall and/or other CD shop.

As for stores closing, let me get this straight: you're so desperate for Dark Side of the Moon, an album released 33 YEARS ago, you have to download it right now, instead of buying the superior sounding CD, for roughly the same price, at a store the next day.

I'm sorry, but I really don't get why anyone would lock themselves into a specific format, when they can buy a CD and convert it to ANY format past, present or future.

The only excuse for buying an album on iTunes/Urge/ is if you are tech illiterate or too lazy to rip/encode a CD for yourself.

Lossy files are fine for your DAP, but if you have a decent stereo, they're not.

I'll wait for lossless audio files....even then I'd probably go with CDs in most cases, but it'd be ok if I just wanted the odd song.

[Bazza @ Jun 21st 2007 12:29PM]

Thats a face for hd radio (DRMed of course)

[netboolie @ Jun 21st 2007 12:59PM]

You guys have officially crossed the line....

[Jason @ Jun 21st 2007 1:34PM]

I used to like CDs until I found that over four hundred of them take up A LOT of space and they don't re-sell for sh!t.

But the feeling of buying that new album back in the day was priceless. The smell of the new packaging, the artwork, the inside of the booklet, and the anticipation of hearing something new were all great things. Somehow, it's just not the same digitally.

[tekdroid @ Jun 21st 2007 5:07PM]

re-sale value of CDs is far higher than re-sale value of itunes tracks.

400CDs in a CD wallet or two takes almost no space. You don't have to keep the jewel cases if you don't want...

[marcoemerson @ Jun 21st 2007 2:58PM]

Let's all laugh at the homeless man with bad teeth.
Ha ha. He probably can't even afford an iPod nano! We're so much better than him with our gadgets!

Another quality post by Thomas Ricker. I sincerely hope you wind up down on your luck like this, with a bunch of materialistic middle-class kids laughing at you. How is his picture even remotely related to the story? Rather than use your big blog advertising money to actually help a guy like this, you put him on the front page to mock. Glad to see your mother raised you right.

[tekdroid @ Jun 21st 2007 5:16PM]

Bhaal,
I realise people value convenience. Hence my amazement.

Convenience over:
*Sound quality
*flexibility
*artwork
*archivability
*flexibility to rip to any audio format, lossless and lossy, past, present & future, for playback on virtually any device - past, present and future (without lossy-to-lossy generational sound quality losses, etc)
*resale value

I don't know where you live, Bhaal, so I won't even argue that some find it useful. I know they do. Still doesn't change my opinion that the overwhelming majority are best served with CDs, and are truly being swindled with digital downloads.

Getting so much less value than a CD (which many argue are overpriced to start with) while the industry rakes in the profits on easily-encoded bad-sounding lossy files - with virtually no emotional value, let alone resale...

[Jason @ Jun 21st 2007 8:06PM]

All my CDs are in books of 100 (from more than 10 years ago) and they STILL take up more space than I would like. For the few tracks that I rarely listen to, it's too much.

Also, while you are right about the re-sale value of CDs vs. iTunes tracks, I have yet to find a CD where I can just pay for a few tracks that I like, not a single of what they're trying to sell me. Most of the songs I have are junk and filler. But if I waited for greatest hits albums, I would miss out on some great songs.

There is a used CD store near me called Everyday Music that lets a person preview discs before they buy, but that requires going to their store and spending a lot of time, or waiting for someone else to get off the listening station so you can have a turn.

That said, I still like physical discs and that nostalgia, but I'm not like audiophiles who will argue to the death over sound quality and how CDs are evil. Times are changing. Do what you want.

[afan @ Jun 21st 2007 10:36PM]

Thank you for the article, it was informative. The picture is truly exploitive and repugnant, however. Please consider removing it.

[tekdroid @ Jun 22nd 2007 5:32PM]

Jason,
If most of the music you buy is filler and junk, as you stated, then I don't doubt the physical goods can be a liability.

I'm just finding it hard to understand how even several hundred CDs can take too much space, especially in CD wallets. If it's such a burden, I'm sure you have a friend that can "borrow" them for some time, after you have ripped the ones you want to any format you want, at any quality level you want. Heaven forbid the RIAA read this.

Listening doesn't really have to be done in-store either, does it? Just purchases, right? So I don't see how buying a CD is tied to listening in-store.

Or am I off-base here? I just don't see any negatives, but if you are mostly into singles rather than album purchases, you might be one of those that can benefit with the online thing.

I'm an album guy myself. If it's mostly filler, I generally have no interest in the artist at all.

[Karl @ Oct 14th 2007 6:21PM]

My friend, believing that iTunes and iPod's are dependent on DRM-Protected music is a fallacy. Did you know that iPod's (the 5th generation videos), iPod Nano's, and iPod shuffles are all outselling iTunes gift certificates. Not even all of them combined, but each one outsells the actual items needed to actually purchase an iTunes. Also, even with the DRM-Free music, iTunes still attaches personal information from your iTunes account to the music that you download off of their store, so it is still possible to identify you. Remember these two things the next time you consider buying from Apple. Stick to CD's my friend, the cases are nice, they do not track you or try to protect their music (which you can easily get around in a multitude of ways), and they have better overall audio quality.
- Karl (Feel free to email me to discuss this, or just plain google it or check the Apple store if you do not believe me).