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How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

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Re: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

#11

Post by dasil003 »

Not surprising. How many people over the past 7 years have gone to the ITMS hoping to buy some Beatles music only to found out that it was surprisingly unavailable. A deeper inspection may have revealed the longstanding feud between Apple Computer and the Beatles' music label Apple Records.

So for a critical mass of people the Beatles on iTunes is big news, and naturally they posted it to Facebook, which naturally got a higher than normal click-through rate. This combination of timeliness and virality is optimally captured by social media, and something for which search gets at best a trickle-down effect. But over the coming months, it becomes old news, and then people start searching for it.

Re: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

#13

Post by sdkmvx »

nhangen wrote: post #2

That's crazy...was I the only one that saw the Beatles coming to iTunes as a non-event? Granted, I'm a fan, but wow.

I saw it as a non-event simply because I already have all of their records (on CD and imported into iTunes). I figured most fans would also have most if not all of their music, so availability on iTunes doesn't change things.

Although it does make it very easy to complete a library that has all but one album or similar. Would be interesting to see how many complete sets were purchased vs. individual albums or even individual songs.

Re: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

#15

Post by po »

We asked Hitwise to run similar data for the US market. The numbers show a marked increase in social media traffic to Apple.com and a drop in search traffic on November 16th, but not enough for the former to surpass the latter.

Looking at the chart, I don't see it. Looks like it's within the normal noise to me. The second chart shows facebook going from 0.04% to 0.08% traffic. Not exactly something to write home about.

So why does hitwise's data show such different numbers for US and UK data?

Re: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

#16

Post by hugh3 »

butterfi wrote: post #12

How did advertising factor into this research? I saw more then a few stories covering the Beatles release on iTunes.

I saw a billboard this morning advertising it. It looked like this one:

http://www.allnewsmac.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Th...

I got confused for a while, thought they'd photoshopped Steve Jobs's face over George Harrison's (left). Don't they look similar?

Re: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

#17

Post by jsz0 »

nhangen wrote: post #2

That's crazy...was I the only one that saw the Beatles coming to iTunes as a non-event? Granted, I'm a fan, but wow.

I'm surprised also but I suppose it makes sense if you start thinking outside of the tech/music fan's world. The majority of the sales were singles. Even though the Beatles are probably the most popular musical act of the last 100 years the majority of people in the real world just want to hear that "nah nah nah" song. They don't know what John ate for lunch on April 3rd 1964 or how many sugars Paul liked in his tea. I'm not sure how to explain the high number of album sales other than the casual fans were digging for singles and realized they liked some of the other songs too.

Re: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

#18

Post by chrisbolt »

derefr wrote: post #10
cletus wrote: post #6

Yeah, sorry no sale, for two reasons: 1. Experian Hitwise samples data from reporting service providers. According to Wikipedia [1] that's 10 million users in the United States. We all know how problematic Internet sampling can be for browser market share and so on, even if it is a large sample; and 2. What does apple.com have to do with the Beatles on iTunes? Most people I would guess access iTunes through the iTune…

> 2. What does apple.com have to do with the Beatles on iTunes? Most people I would guess access iTunes through the iTunes application. You can link directly to a song or album within iTMS (the application) through an HTTP URL, which happens to be rooted on a subdomain of apple.com, which then redirects you to the actual itms:// scheme URI that opens iTunes.

Doesn't that neglect all of the people who clicked on the iTunes store within iTunes and bought Beatles songs from there, without leaving itms://?
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