iTunes aims to speed up sales with prizes placed on 100m tune

Just following the launch of the commodore e-Vic and announcement of Sony's compact lightweight players, Apple has a new tactic to try and keep up its market share.  Who ever downloads the 95 millionth song and every 100,000th song purchase after that will receive a free 20GB iPod.  The song purchase count is currently very near 95 million.

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Apple missed its expected 100 million song target for April 2003, but they still want to hit it as soon as possible.  Who ever purchases the 100 millionth tune will receive an Apple 17" PowerBook, 40GB iPod and 10,000 free tunes. 

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Apple's European iTunes service is running very well with 1.5 million tunes sold its first two weeks between the UK, France and Germany.  GristyMcFisty submitted the following news via our  news submit :

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Apple today announced it will hand out a 17in PowerBook, a 40GB iPod and 10,000 free songs to whoever downloads track number 100m from the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). As well as getting punters busily buying songs, the announcement may take a little attention away, perhaps, from Sony's new 'iPod killer' hard drive-based Walkman, launched today.

The giveaway begins sooner: whoever downloads song number 95m, and every 100,000th track after that, will receive a free 20GB iPod. Apple expects the first winner to be chosen sometime tomorrow.

The 100m target is something of a mixed blessing for Apple. It's a key goal, no doubt, but one the company had expected to reach within a year of ITMS's April 2003 launch.

But despite missing that deadline, Apple remains the major online music player. The company claims a 70 per cent market share. And having sold some 1.5m songs in the UK, France and Germany in the first two weeks or so since opening for business here, Apple is going a long way to replicating its US success.

By contrast, it took European online music pioneer OD2 - now part of Loudeye - thirteen-and-a-half weeks to rack up 1m downloads at the start of the year.

Meanwhile, Apple is expected to announce a 60GB iPod shortly after its hard drive supplier, Toshiba, inadvertently said it was gearing up to ship 60GB drives to the company.

The iPod Mini is expected to go on sale in Europe and the Far East this month; Apple was forced to delay the product's introduction in these territories because of restricted supplies of 1in HDDs.

 

It will be interesting to see whether a Mac or Windows iTunes user wins the PowerBook.  Then again if a Windows iTunes user wins the PowerBook, I wonder if they will make the switch from their Windows PC 😉 

 


Even though Apple is planning on releasing a 60GB iPod soon, I cannot see anyone having enough music to fill this with the exception of those having an insane CD, MP3 or iTunes collection.  Then again, it would make a very useful mass storage device.

 

Feel free to discuss and find out more about iTunes and alternative music services on our Music Downloads, P2P & Legal Issues Forum.

Source: The Register - eCommerce

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