Apple, iTunes and Magic Statistics

As it was already written in one of our recent articles, December is a hot time for IT journalists: interesting press releases, pre-holiday presentations of new products, results of the year and forecasts for the future are pouring rain of gold. And the main thing here - do not lose your head and keep a sober approach to business. However, this is not always the case and one of these cases happened this week.

Forrester Research , an independent technology and market research company, on December 6 published the Few iPod Owners Are Big iTunes Buyers research. The central theme of this 14-page report was the financial performance and popularity of the iTunes service from Apple. Forrester’s vice president Josh Bernoff (Josh Bernoff), the author of the study, applied an interesting method — he took data on almost 2,800 credit cards owned by ordinary Americans with Internet access from his home, and calculated how many purchases they made on iTunes. often and for how much they did it during 2006.

The main conclusions that are made in the study (they are presented in the abstract) are as follows:
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• ITunes’s monthly revenue rose steadily in 2004 and 2005;
• More than 3% of owners of home computers with access to the Network in 2006 made purchases in the iTunes Music Store;
• Most buyers turned to ITMS no more than three times a year;
• The sums of most purchases did not exceed $ 3;
• Most buyers spent less than $ 20 on iTunes;
• Apple sold 20 songs to each iPod via iTunes.

The first reviews of the study, such as, for example, in the New York Times , were limited to a brief coverage of these findings. But then Register and Bloomberg , on December 11 and 12, respectively, by agreement, fished out a single phrase from the report that after the New Year holidays at the beginning of this year, the amount of purchases on ITMS fell by 17% , and sales - by 65% relative to ... here lies the vagueness. Among the common hype, we still haven’t found out what these numbers refer to, but the journalists from these publications decided that it was a question of falling sales in the first half of this year .

Naturally, such catastrophic indicators hit the heads of the stockbrokers like a gold bar, and a uniform panic began on Wall Street. Apple shares rapidly lost 3% in weight, bringing the company millions of dollars in losses. The “scandalous” report was trumpeted all over the world: these events were reflected even in the comments to one of the news of our Feed.

Apple called the research data crazy and, as always, refused to submit any information to the refutation, but then ... On December 13, completely confused and probably drunk more than one package of valerian Josh Bernoff hurried to disown all these terrible figures and said, that they misunderstood him — the very same 65% referred to the “seasonal decline in activity”. The report was specifically sent to Apple, but again there was no response.

However, the refutation of Bernoff did not meet with any attention from the press and for two days it raged by inertia until two other analytical companies, Piper Jaffray and ComScore, made directly opposite reports, which said that iTunes sales grew by 78 %, and resource attendance - 84%. But Apple’s “well-wishers”, who had already opened more than one bottle of champagne to celebrate the fall of the giant, responded that the reports were paid for by the company’s management.

The situation is still not clear, and the importance of its outcome cannot be underestimated. If the unprofitableness of iTunes, the traditional flagship of online music trading, is confirmed, this will completely change the whole picture in the music market.