Apples marginaler är ju inte stora på iTS, och de tar in mycket av pengarna genom att sälja iPod. Jag undrar om Amazon har några marginaler alls? De kanske räknar med att ta igen en viss förlust genom att få ett ökat antal kunder?
Har du kollat in artikeln hos Daring Fireball som jag länkade i inlägget före ditt? Där har du ett tänkbart svar på dina funderingar:
So why is Amazon even bothering with a music download store, given that “everyone knows” the iTunes Store is a loss-leader that Apple offers just to sell more iPods?
Because that’s bullshit. Apple is making good money from the iTunes Store.
[...]
So, ballpark-estimate-wise, it’s safe to say Apple gets about 30 cents per song sold — and even more for songs sold in Europe, given the euro’s current strength against the dollar. On July 31, Apple announced that they’d sold the three-billionth song from the iTunes Store. Three billion songs times $.30 per song is $900 million.
900 miljoner dollar är inte fy skam va? Men kringkostnader då?
Bandwidth, credit card processing fees, and whatever other costs Apple incurs running and developing the actual store come out of Apple’s share of the revenue. Those costs are significant, but it’s a pretty good bet they’ve totalled up to a lot less than $900 million.
Dessutom: det växer så det knakar:
And, iTunes Store music sales are growing — fast. Apple announced the two-billionth song sold just six months earlier. Even if the acceleration stops, which it won’t soon, Apple is already selling two billion songs per year, for $600 million in revenue.
And, as if that weren’t enough, I suspect Apple makes a nice chunk of change on the other $.70 of each song sold. Assuming Apple issues payments to the record labels only periodically — weekly, monthly, quarterly — Apple gets to hold onto that money in the interim, during which time they earn interest on it. It doesn’t require a high interest rate to make a lot of money on two billion dollars flowing through your hands.
In short, while Apple doesn’t earn much at all on the sale of a single song, they make up for it in volume. And squeezing profits out of low-margin high-volume transactions is right up Amazon’s alley. The iTunes Store podcast directory? Maybe that’s a loss-leader. But the iTunes Music Store? That’s serious business.
