Beatles
How Apple sold 2 million Beatles songs
November 27, 2010: 6:40 AM ETThe traffic came largely from Facebook and other social networks, not search engines
What drove Beatles fans to iTunes on Nov. 16, the day Apple (AAPL) released the first digital editions of The Beatles' catalog?
Robin Goad, research director of Hitwise UK, has analyzed the traffic from his side of the pond and turned up some surprising and not-so-surprising results:
- Traffic to the Apple website spiked dramatically that day, with visits from U.K. Internet users increasing by 382% between Nov. 14 and Nov. 16.
- 26.32% of all Apple traffic on the 16th came from social networks, compared with 16.59% two days earlier.
- On the day of the release, one in every 200 visits that left Facebook went directly to http://www.apple.com.
- Searches for all Beatles-related terms increased 30-fold that week, but Wikipedia got 31.44% of the search clicks, and Apple U.K. only 1.24%. Apparently, people were searching for information about the Beatles, not their music.
For more of Goad's charts and graphs, click here.
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
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Apple sells 450,000 Beatles albums
A strong, but not a blockbuster showing, according to the New York Times
It may not have been a day we'll never forget, as Apple's (AAPL) teaser promised, but the launch of the Beatles on iTunes did make a splash.
EMI announced Tuesday that in their first week as digital downloads on iTunes, more than 450,000 Beatles albums and 2 million individual tracks were purchased worldwide.
That's better than the skeptics predicted, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 23, 2010 5:33 PM ET -
Beatles fans trash Forrester analyst
Flooded with angry comments after disparaging the "geezer skew" of digital downloads
Forrester's Mark Mulligan thought he was making a point about the state of the music business, not the quality of The Beatles' music, when he posted a brief item Tuesday congratulating Steve Jobs for finally getting the Fab Four on Apple's (AAPL) music store:
"The fact that securing the content of a band old enough to be most young MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 17, 2010 7:26 AM ET -
Meet The Beatles' bestsellers
One day after Tuesday's release, their 15 albums and 1 box set are all in the iTunes' top 50
It was often said during Apple's (AAPL) protracted negotiations with Apple Corps. and EMI to put The Beatles' catalog on iTunes, that anybody who cared about the music had already ripped the CDs.
Apparently that's not the case.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 17, 2010 6:30 AM ET -
Behind the Beatles-iTunes deal
Getting Apple, Apple Corps., EMI, Sony/ATV and Yoko Ono to agree took some doing
"While details remain to be worked out, Fortune has learned that iTunes is close to a deal to bring the Beatles catalog online."
So wrote Tim Arango, now at New York Times, in Fortune's Nov. 27, 2006 issue.
"As Fortune went to press," he wrote, "numerous deal points were still being hammered out. According to a music industry MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 16, 2010 12:41 PM ET -
Meet the Beatles
The Beatles catalog showed up on the iTunes store around 9:40 a.m. EST, about 20 minutes before the appointed hour. Press release here. That seems to be all the news we'll get from Apple's (AAPL) this morning. Oh well.
"We had expected Apple to also announce a cloud-based, iTunes streaming service but we were wrong," wrote Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster in a note to clients issued Tuesday morning. He continues:
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 16, 2010 9:59 AM ET -
One more time: The Beatles on iTunes?
Putting their catalog on Apple's music store wouldn't make it a day I'd never forget
Billboard and the Wall Street Journal have stuck their necks out and reported that they know what's behind the teaser Apple (AAPL) posted on its website Monday morning. As the Journal put it:
"Apple Inc. is preparing to announce that its iTunes Store will soon start carrying music by the Beatles, according to people MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 15, 2010 8:18 PM ET -
Apple's Sept. 9 music event: What's Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?
New iPods? Check. With cameras? Very likely. iTunes 9? Why not. Steve Jobs on stage? Who knows. The Beatles on iTunes? Don't count on it -- but don't count it out, either.
Apple's (AAPL) invitation-only special event Wednesday could go either way.
It could be a ploy to get the press to publicize some relatively inconsequential improvements in Apple's increasingly long-in-the-tooth iPod line (a product line that once accounted for anywhere from MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Sep 8, 2009 6:18 AM ET -
How the Beatles became a video game
Leave aside for the moment the rumors that Apple Inc. (AAPL) has invited a number of music industry professionals and press to an iPod/iTunes special event on Sept. 9.
We know for a fact that Apple Corps and EMI have scheduled the worldwide release of the original Beatles catalog -- digitally remastered for the first time -- in compact disc format on 09/09/09, an event timed to coincide with MTV Games' MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Aug 19, 2009 8:02 AM ET -
The Beatles and iTunes: A question of money?
Last we checked, the full catalog of Beatles songs was supposed to be available for sale on the iTunes Store before the end of 2008.
Well, it's not happening this year, according to one of the band's two surviving members, and for all we know it may never happen.
"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," Paul McCartney told reporters gathered Monday for MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Nov 25, 2008 12:35 PM ETPosted in: Apple, Apple Corps, Beatles, EMI, Fake Steve Jobs, iTunes, iTunes Store, Paul McCartney, Steve Jobs
