How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search) | Hacker News Reader

How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search)

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33 pointsn-named16 comments

Not surprising. How many people over the past 7 years have gone to the ITMS hoping to buy some Beatles music only to found out that it was surprisingly unavailable. A deeper inspection may have revealed the longstanding feud between Apple Computer and the Beatles' music label Apple Records.

So for a critical mass of people the Beatles on iTunes is big news, and naturally they posted it to Facebook, which naturally got a higher than normal click-through rate. This combination of timeliness and virality is optimally captured by social media, and something for which search gets at best a trickle-down effect. But over the coming months, it becomes old news, and then people start searching for it.

That's crazy...was I the only one that saw the Beatles coming to iTunes as a non-event? Granted, I'm a fan, but wow.

In perspective, the iTunes store has sold ten billion songs in total, and The Beatles is one of the most popular bands of all time, with well over a hundred songs that people actually like. Two million downloads doesn't surprise me that much.

And now having been reminded that The Beatles are now on iTunes, I'm gonna go download some.

I saw it as a non-event simply because I already have all of their records (on CD and imported into iTunes). I figured most fans would also have most if not all of their music, so availability on iTunes doesn't change things.

Although it does make it very easy to complete a library that has all but one album or similar. Would be interesting to see how many complete sets were purchased vs. individual albums or even individual songs.

I'm surprised also but I suppose it makes sense if you start thinking outside of the tech/music fan's world. The majority of the sales were singles. Even though the Beatles are probably the most popular musical act of the last 100 years the majority of people in the real world just want to hear that "nah nah nah" song. They don't know what John ate for lunch on April 3rd 1964 or how many sugars Paul liked in his tea. I'm not sure how to explain the high number of album sales other than the casual fans were digging for singles and realized they liked some of the other songs too.

That's a lot of Beatles fans. I wonder if Steve purchased a bunch?

I wonder how big a role Ping played in all this. I still haven't figured out the point of it, but maybe Apple managed to leverage it in the sales success.

Yeah, sorry no sale, for two reasons:

1. Experian Hitwise samples data from reporting service providers. According to Wikipedia [1] that's 10 million users in the United States. We all know how problematic Internet sampling can be for browser market share and so on, even if it is a large sample; and

2. What does apple.com have to do with the Beatles on iTunes? Most people I would guess access iTunes through the iTunes application.

Now I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm just not convinced they're right. If Apple released their referrer stats, that'd be something else entirely.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitwise

> 2. What does apple.com have to do with the Beatles on iTunes? Most people I would guess access iTunes through the iTunes application.

You can link directly to a song or album within iTMS (the application) through an HTTP URL, which happens to be rooted on a subdomain of apple.com, which then redirects you to the actual itms:// scheme URI that opens iTunes.

Doesn't that neglect all of the people who clicked on the iTunes store within iTunes and bought Beatles songs from there, without leaving itms://?

We asked Hitwise to run similar data for the US market. The numbers show a marked increase in social media traffic to Apple.com and a drop in search traffic on November 16th, but not enough for the former to surpass the latter.

Looking at the chart, I don't see it. Looks like it's within the normal noise to me. The second chart shows facebook going from 0.04% to 0.08% traffic. Not exactly something to write home about.

So why does hitwise's data show such different numbers for US and UK data?

Seems it says a lot more about demographics than about the power of Facebook. The demographics that don't use Facebook as heavily are, I would guess, the same demographics that already own The Beatles' library, not only on Vinyl, but on CDs.

Even twenty-somethings like myself probably own a few Beatles albums. Or we have transferred our parents' shelves full of LPs into a more durable format (or that's what we will tell the RIAA should they show up at our doors.)

I would think the commercials and news blitz helped a lot...

How did advertising factor into this research? I saw more then a few stories covering the Beatles release on iTunes.

I saw a billboard this morning advertising it. It looked like this one:

http://www.allnewsmac.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Th...

I got confused for a while, thought they'd photoshopped Steve Jobs's face over George Harrison's (left). Don't they look similar?

The cited Billboard article is fascinating as well:

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i3...

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