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| Is iTunes Making the World A Smaller Place?
Love or Loathe Apple and their iPods, their online store, iTunes, which launched in April of 2003, has now surpassed retail chains to become the third largest retailer of music in the United States. Only super stores Best Buy and Wal-Mart exceed iTunes sales of music in the first quarter of this year. What this means is that iTunes accounts for ten percent of all the music sales in the US alone and just counting the digital music sales, iTunes accounts for seventy percent according to independent researchers at NPD as reported in Rolling Stone magazine.
While iTunes’ growth is largely tied to the sale of iPods, the growth of iTunes as a place to buy music makes it an increasingly more important venue for getting your music out there to the people, if you are an artist, whether you’re a current chart topper or up and coming artists trying to build an audience. It is even a great outlet for international artists to sell their albums outside the territory of the release of their albums.
For example, Nanne Grönvall, known to us ABBA fans as Benny Andersson’s daughter-in-law, is quite popular with ABBAMAILers and it’s comforting to know, despite the fact her albums are in Swedish, and most of us don’t live in Sweden, our local version of iTunes has her most recent album and singles available for us to buy, even though there’s no chance of finding her latest album in a local retail outlet. It makes it a quick and cheap alternative to be able to enjoy the album than spending twice as much or more to import the CD from Sweden and pay all the postage costs, not to mention the waiting time for the CD to be physically shipped from Sweden to wherever you are.
Also to note, up and coming bands like Ludvig Andersson’s (One of Benny’s sons) band, Ella Rouge and CJ Palmer, the band I reviewed in my June 2007 column, are two up and coming bands from Sweden that can be enjoyed from iTunes regardless of where in the world your local iTunes is.
Stepping outside of Swedish based artists, fans of Steps from the UK (one of the UK pop bands from the 1990’s that was thought to be very ABBA like) might be interested to know that Lisa Scott-Lee’s solo album “Never Or Now” has been available on iTunes since May and it has yet to be released anywhere in the world as a physical CD, although that is being remedied in the UK very soon. But it certainly is cheaper to just get the digital version online from iTunes.
Even Louise Pitre, who originated the role of Donna in the Canadian and Broadway versions of “Mamma Mia”, her latest solo album is available in iTunes even though the physical album is not available outside of Canada. These are just a few examples out of many, download iTunes and check out the store for the hard to get artists you like from other countries, you may be surprised that they are available for you to download from there.
It does make the world feel like a much smaller place when you can go to an online store and find music from the international artists you like without having to go to the time and expense of ordering and waiting for a CD to arrive from halfway around the globe. There’s something about instant gratification that you just can’t beat. Ryan |
