Jinn of Quality and Risk

Rolling Stone on Apple's first two weeks of sales at their online Music Store: although initial numbers are impressive, they represent a small portion of the music industry's $11.5 billion annual revenue. At this pace, the labels stand to earn about $33.8 million from the iTunes Music Store this year, which lags behind the $45.4 million that vinyl records brought in last year. That projection ignores two coming new markets for Apple's music store: users of the Microsoft Windows platform, who outnumber Macintosh users by about twenty-five to one in the US, and international Internet users, who are more numerous than the Americans. A (simplistic) scaling would put Apple's annual online sales of music at around $1b once these two markets are opened. Even if it's less than half of that, it would still be 5% of the music industry's current revenue!