Beats To Become Part Of iTunes As Apple’s Music Sales Fall 14% This Year
Global music sales at Apple’s iTunes are down 13% – 14% since the start of the year, according to a new report. The reason are obvious – ubiquitous free music alongside ad-supported and paid streaming. The cure, Apple hopes, is Beats Music, which it acquired along with Beats audio for $3.2 billion.
The paid music streamer will reportedly be folded into Apple's iTunes music services, informed sources tell the Wall Street Journal. Apple is is reportedly in the midst if rebuilding Beats Music to fit its design and tech platform, with the hope of relaunching it sometime next year, as the paid streaming music arm of iTunes.
Global revenue from downloads also fell 2.1% in 2013, according to the IFPI.
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Down 14%? i’m surprised they have any sales at all. Why buy when you can stream anything you want at any time for next to nothing and if that’s not cheap enough you can go to youtube and find every song in the top 100 available to listen to millions of times for free. beats is not gonna help here. a 10 dollar a month subscription to listen to as many songs as you want to for as long as your want “is the problem”. the system is broken and it needs fixing. you can’t “sell” a product that some people are giving away for free or close to free. if we don’t stop youtube, spotify, pandora and all the rest of these sites from streaming music for practically no money paid out to artists we won’t have a music business anymore. it’ll just be music as a hobby because you certainly can’t live on what these guys pay artists and songwriters.