

How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search) - n-named
http://searchengineland.com/beatles-2-million-songs-mostly-facebook-not-search-56901?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+searchengineland+(Search+Engine+Land:+Google,+Bing,+SEO,+PPC,+SEM+%26+Search+Marketing+News)&utm_content=Twitter

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dasil003
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.

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nhangen
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.

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hugh3
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.

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kmfrk
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.

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cletus
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>

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derefr
> 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.

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chrisbolt
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://?

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po
_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?

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lukeschlather
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.)

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

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

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hugh3
I saw a billboard this morning advertising it. It looked like this one:

[http://www.allnewsmac.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2010/11/Th...](http://www.allnewsmac.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2010/11/The_Beatles_on_Apple_Home_Page.png)

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

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Hates_
The cited Billboard article is fascinating as well:

[http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i3...](http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i39b5c49ccd74a21f12815b9fb843970c)

