Apple's digital music revenues are declining, but could it really bring iTunes to Android?
As
Apple's revenue from music sales on iTunes continue to decline, the
company is considering the previously unthinkable — an iTunes app for
Android. According to a report from Billboard today, Apple is
looking to fill the gap left by declining traditional music sales
through iTunes by both expanding the store to Android and launching a
paid music subscription service. Google brought its own Google Play Music service over to iOS, but it'd be an entirely different situation if Apple did the same for Android.
Apple
makes up roughly 40 percent of the U.S. digital music market, but the
market as a whole is seeing double-digit declines in sales in recent
years. It currently has a free, ad-supported radio service in iTunes Radio,
but makes a vast majority of its profits in media from the standard
single and album sales through the iTunes Store. The move to a flat rate
subscription music service could be a new revenue stream for Apple, but
it probably wouldn't close the gap and put it back on a growth path in
digital music revenue.
Expanding out to Android would open its
store to potentially hundreds of millions of new devices and users who
would otherwise not shop at iTunes for music, but that doesn't make this
an automatic slam dunk. Google and Amazon have pretty well entrenched
themselves in the digital music sales on Android devices, not to mention
the intense competition in the subscription music arena with the likes
of Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, Beats Music and of course Google itself.
Most
think that hell would freeze over before iTunes came to Android, but it
may just be the way that Apple continues to expand its music revenues.
The purported talks to make these new apps a reality are in very early
stages, so it could be some time before our suspicions are confirmed.
Post a Comment