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Rocking to iTunes

Selling three million songs a day currently, Apple’s iTunes could sell one billion songs at the end of this year alone. The online music store owned by the computer giant covers almost 83 per cent of downloadable online music. That’s market monopoly at its mightiest. Yet, it is claimed that those big sale numbers do not exactly translate into equally big financial returns for the company. Although it charges 99 cents for individual songs, after paying its partners —music companies and artists —it’s left with only 25 to 30 cents, barely enough to break even. That may be a reasonable explanation but Apple does benefit substantially from its online music store. It’s this sale that helps Apple hard-sell its phenomenal product, iPod, the real money spinner that has again broken all recent sale records in this category. iPod, which has captured the imagination of the young and music lovers everywhere, has emerged as a style icon of sorts.

Apple sold 14 million iPods in the last three months of the last year alone —almost half of the company’s total sales. But with more old and new players girding themselves to take on Apple, it remains to be seen if the firm can really retain this monopoly of music market in the years to come.