The iTunes fast-food delivery for music may be hurting acts more than it helps them. Dance act Estelle recently withdrew from iTunes and her album sales increased by 35%.
The impact iTunes is having on the decline of music is not going unnoticed.While sales are down considerably in recent years, artists not on iTunes have been registering increases.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the two biggest selling catalog acts last year were The Beatles and AC/DC. Neither act is on iTunes.
In comparison, the Rolling Stones, who do allow their music on iTunes, sold the least number of albums compared to their contemporaries.
The Rolling Stones have sold six-million tracks on iTunes to date, but the revenue generated from those sales is just a fraction of the money made from the 2.7 million albums AC/DC sold last year in the USA.
Kid Rock has refused to allow his latest album `Rock n Roll Jesus` to be sold on iTunes. The result, the album has sold more than 2 million copies in America making it one of the Top 3 selling albums of the year.
The reason iTunes is not working for the music industry is because iTunes dictates to the music industry. iTunes tells artists that there is no such thing as an album, that it is a collection of individual songs and then sells the songs that way.
That doesn`t work for a lot of artists. Sometimes, a song will only make sense in context of a complete album.
AC/DC have never allowed their record label to release a greatest hits record for the same reason. They want fans to hear the songs in context.
The Beatles issue is more to do with the royalty breakdown from iTunes. It is not a model that works for artists. It is ridiculous that a song should cost almost the same digitally as it does for the physical disc.
Artists using iTunes are expected to wear almost the same royalty breakdown as they get for the physical disc as well, yet there is no breakage, no manufacturing and no distribution costs.
The music industry is slowly waking up to the fact that iTunes has never been about selling music, it has only ever been about selling iPods.
Estelle`s withdrawal from iTunes may very well be the tip of the iceberg for artists getting out.
If it doesn`t work for Estelle or AC/DC or The Beatles or Kid Rock, then who is it working for'
