http://www.macworld.co.uk...ewsID=8386

Macworld Daily News



Wednesday - April 07, 2004
Music's tidal wave of change
By Macworld staff

Legal song downloads have "risen tenfold", according to the BBC, citing European music distributor, OD2.


Artists from the emerging 'Third Estate' of Internet music – those who work independently from the music labels, or who are experimenting with new ways to work with established music media properties while experimenting online – should also take heart from good news regarding Prince's new online venture.


Prince launched his own Musicology Download Store last month, and has seen "six figures on sales in the first week alone," according to Digital Music News. George Michael has already announced his plan to quit the music business and to sell his tracks independently online.


The BBC report meanwhile claims OutKast's 'Hey Ya!' track has been the most popular legally downloaded track in the first quarter in the UK.


Internet music distributor OD2 told the BBC that the top 100 music downloads account for just 11 per cent of online sales: the top 100 CD singles account for 77 per cent of total CD singles sales, the report claims.

6 figures for "Musicology" makes me as skeptical as 250,000 copies of "Crystal Ball" sold. Prince's unknown musical projects just don't sell THAT well. C'mon.

This article does not state that Prince has had 6 figures in sales for "Musicology". It states that his musicology download store has seen 6 figures in sales in the first week. Now if you think about this, it is totally reasonable. Let's say that as a conservitive estimate a person downloads $10 dollars worth of music from Prince (one full album), then it would take 10,000 downloads to reach 6 figures in sales. Now it has been reported that the NPG Music Club has over 400,000 members. So if you do a little simple math, that would mean that he would only need 2.5% of his current membership to download one album to reach 6 figure sales. On top of that, it is highly likely that people would download more than just one album. Possibly two albums or an album and some singles. Therefore we should raise the average amount spent by each person to around $13-$14. Considering all of this, I would say that Prince has probably made at least $300,000 to $400,000 with his new download store.

Hey, Diamond99 - that oius a very plausiable argument. I know I downloaded the albums Musicology and Chocolate Invasion as well as the single Magnificent (at Member price). Thus, I have provided to that figure.

regarding the sales figures:

if you were like me and had the download problems i had, it resulted in me
being charged for 11 copies of Musicology...(which NPGmusic club is refuding)

but if this type of thing happened to a lot of people (which based on the music club's
response to me, it sounds like it did) you are going to have one hell of an overstated
first week of sales!