Report on Amarok sales of Magnatune music

In November, Linux music player Amarok shipped with Magnatune support built-in.

As far as overall sales go, I'm very pleased as they've been strong and consistent.

Here are the stats:

- 473 albums sold through Amarok Since October 31st 2006 to April 20th 2007.

- representing $3579 in purchases

- after the visa processing fee is taken off the top, this is $3,198.84, which then means $320 for Amarok. Annualized, at this current rate, this should be around $1,000 a year for Amarok, and $10,000 for Magnatune, which is absolutely great, as I'm happy to support them.

- I expect that these numbers could easily be 2x to 3x more once the main Linux distros really start shipping with the magnatune support (Suse just started, Ubuntu is about to)

- the sales are very consistent -- a few albums sell because of Amarok almost every day, which suggests the feature is not viewed as a gimmick, but as something that is used regularly. The chart at the right shows how rock-solid reliable they are.

-john

Comments

[JP Renaud]

I have just tried the Amarok support to purchase an album and it is indeed excellent. I did not try earlier as I was worried I could not choose which file format to get, I thought it that would download in MP3 and I use Ogg Vorbis. But you can choose the format, where to download *after* paying and the artwork is automatically downloaded too. May I suggest you ask the Amarok developers to say precisely that choosing the format is done after paying?

[David Brown]

Um, don't you mean $1000 for Amarok, $4500 for Magnatune, and $5500 for the artists whose works are sold? Or something like that...

[John Buckman]

"Um, don't you mean $1000 for Amarok, $4500 for Magnatune, and $5500 for the artists whose works are sold?"

The Amarok 10% referral fee comes off the top, so on $3198 of sales (gross sales after visa fees) Amarok gets $320, and then Magnatune and the artist split 50/50 what's left (50% each of $2,880)

-john

Eager to see how sales via Rhythmbox compare (Magnatune integration is much more recent AFAIK, though is shipping with Ubuntu 7.04).

[Al Arduengo]

I just discovered the Rhythmbox integration and was very excited! I did not like to have to use Amarok necessarily. The only negative thing is that it is too easy for me to buy music now. :-P

Cheers!
-Al

[Daniel Cohen]

I actually used rhythmbox to do this, but hey, it's still awesome :D

Also, thankyou for letting .ogg be a downloadable format!