286 million MP3 Players in 4 years

[nOBeLium]

I just posted the article 286 million MP3 Players in 4 years.

On 2005,
we've noticed that 17%
of all holiday season whish lists had an MP3 player on top,
specially wanted by teens. According to In-Stat Research Company, MP3...

Read the full article here:  [http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/11795-286-million-MP3-Players-in-4-years.html](http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/11795-286-million-MP3-Players-in-4-years.html)

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[yronnen]

The ‘cool factor’ is the main drive for Apple right now. There are better and cheaper products today, but you don’t say “mp3 player” today, but “ipod”. That’s Apple’s greatest victory. However, Apple does not learn from its own history. Keeping the technology to itself (in this case, its DRM’d iTunes) will backfire eventually. The revenue streams come from iTunes, not iPod. If they will open their iTunes to other mp3 players, they will make a big $$.

[bravacentauri83]

“The revenue streams come from iTunes, not iPod.” Isn’t it the other way around? If you can provide a link to some of this info then I would greatly appreciate it. I like to stay updated on this stuff. From what I understand: iTunes is there to encourage people to download music using the service and be able to play the music on your iPod. The record companies basically take the majority of the profit on each song. Both items market each other well, but the money maker is the hardware.

[nOBeLium]

I think Apple is like Microsoft on this strategy…make a lot of profit from games, but not the console itself. I think they’re loosing a lot of money with xbox360 right now, but the services they sell (Xbox Live, games, etc) result in profit.

[yronnen]

Well, the trend of most companies today is to get revenue streams from services, not product. You can see it in the way that all software companies are moving to the ASP (application software providers) model where the customers pay monthly fees for using a software, car security (On-Star) etc. I can tell you that most of our business partners are not interested to sell our products; they want to create services for these products, services that require monthly fees. The idea is that you will buy your iPod once but buy music all the time.
[edited by yronnen on 04.05.2006 06:01]

[tylau]

When can we buy the DRM music on-the-fly, and stream it from everywhere at realtime, storage is not a problem then. Next revolution might well come by at the time of wimax, lol.