Apple sees little interest in renting music

Tags: Apple, MusicMarketing

In yesterday's conference call on Apple's impressive earnings, Apple Chief Financial Office Peter Oppenheimer provided some interesting bits on Apple's music business, reinforcing an opinion Blackfriars wrote back in January: Apple's purchase model for music is vastly outgrowing competing subscription services. And lest anyone question the business value of the iTunes Music Store, it is making profit for Apple as well as revenue.

The iTunes Music Store continues to be the world's leading online music service. It operates in 19 countries which represents about 70% of the global music business. We are close to crossing the major milestone of 0.5 billion songs sold, and despite increased competition from companies like Napster, Microsoft and Yahoo!, our share of legally purchased and downloaded music in the United States has actually increased to above 80% as measured by Nielsen SoundScan.

…With our share… growing to over 80%… we just don't think very many customers are interested in renting their music. So we think that the success of the iTunes Music Stores show that most customers want to own their music.