Kokopelli Times » amazon.com

Holiday Sales

Erik Rostad — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:24:00 +0000

Happy Holidays! Well, that’s the mood for digital music retailers. The week of December 22 – 28 had the most digital tracks ever sold for a one-week period. The total was 47.7 million tracks sold during the week. This was a 126% increase from the week before. Not bad.

The number of digital downloads for the entire year of 2008 numbered 1,070,000,000. This is up 27% from 2007, but is still not enough to cover the loss in income from cd sales. The top downloaded song was Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance.’

In other news, Amazon.com had a record holiday season as well. On one day alone, December 15th, Amazon had 6.3 million orders come in. That is 72.9 items ordered per second. This is a 17% rise from sales last year.

Stay tuned,
Erik
erikrostad.com

Amazon & Google

Erik Rostad — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:10:00 +0000

Google will soon be launching a new mobile phone operating on the Android platform. The new phone, the G1, will be sold by T-Mobile. The phone is expected to be available by October of this year.

One major feature for this G1 phone will be the inclusion of Amazon’s MP3 store preloaded onto the device. Users will be able to download songs from Amazon’s vast library in a DRM-free (digital rights management) format. Users will also be able to listen to 30-second samples of the songs and will need to be in a Wi-Fi area to download the songs. This all sounds very similar to the iTunes store on the iPhone. The main difference will be the price per song (iTunes $0.99 vs Amazon’s $0.79) and Apple’s use of DRM.

Stay tuned,
Erik
erikrostad.com

CreateSpace

Erik Rostad — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:13:00 +0000

Things keep getting better for independent artists who want to promote their music from their living rooms. Amazon.com is increasing their influence in the arena through their CreateSpace website. Through CreateSpace, artists can set up an area online where they sell their MP3′s and where they will be listed on Amazon.com’s MP3 store.

The really nice thing for artists is that there are no set-up fees. And artists get to retain the rights to their music. That is a huge deal to an artist, especially an up and coming artist. In the past, most artists would sign away their rights to a song for a nice chunk of up-front change. They would go buy Bentley’s and cribs, but be broke a few years later when the record labels were banking on their success.

Another important feature here is Amazon’s clout. Right now if I go to Amazon.com’s MP3 page, they offer me a number of suggestions based upon artists I have searched for in the past. Just imagine Amazon’s influence in this arena if they suggest your music to consumers who liked similar artists. The music discovery aspect of this is great, and it could lead to a nice, and immediate profit.

As I have written in the past, artists need to careful to pick and choose the websites they join carefully. Too much exposure could be a killer, and not enough won’t get you very far. The CreateSpace site seems like a safe bet.

Stay tuned,
Erik
erikrostad.com