San Francisco, May 03: Master showman and marketer extraordinaire Steve Jobs has about 250,000 new reasons to be happy about Apple Computer Inc., the company he co-founded in 1976 in his parents' California home. That's the number of songs purchased and downloaded -- at 99 cents a pop -- on the first day of operation of Apple's online music store, according to record industry sources.
"For the launch of a service that is Apple only, those are good numbers," said analyst Rob Enderle of Giga Information Group, a unit of market researcher Forrester Research. "Not a bad start."
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
Jobs on Monday launched Apple's online music service, which is integrated into its iTunes music software program and for now available only on its Macintosh computers. It boasted more than 200,000 tracks on Monday and is growing daily, Apple said.
In typical Jobs fashion he first touted versions of Apple's popular and critically acclaimed iPod portable digital music players that hold even more songs (up to 7,500 now on the most expensive model), an updated version of its Safari Web browser and then he took the wraps off the music store.
Jobs, known for his powers of persuasion and marketing savvy, clinched licensing deals with the five biggest record labels, and industry executives have given the Apple online music service high marks.
Apple also raised eyebrows last month with its talks to acquire Vivendi's Universal Music, the world's largest label. Jobs subsequently issued a statement in which he declined making an offer for Universal or any other large record label, but he did not deny that such talks had taken place.
Apple's offering will compete against not only free file-sharing systems such as Kazaa and Morpheus, but also industry-backed services such as PressPlay, MusicNet and Rhapsody, which work with Windows computers.
Record industry executives have expressed hope that Apple's music offering, along with other, legal for-pay services, can lure users away from the file-sharing Internet services that music companies have partly blamed for slumping CD sales.
According to analysts and others who have tried it, the service is reliable and a snap to use. Users can browse or search by album, music genre, song title and artist, and, when they find a song they want, click on a "Buy it" button to download it into a special folder in the iTunes program.
From there, music aficionados can compile playlists and transfer them to CDs up to 10 times before they are required to change the playlist. Users can also transfer the tunes to as many iPod players as they like and to a maximum of three Macintosh computers.
Analysts said that revenue from the Apple service will likely not be material to the company until the offering is compatible with Windows-based PCs, which account for more than 90 percent of the market. Apple has about 3 percent of the market for PCs.
"The big revenue opportunity is when they move this off the Apple base," Enderle said.
Assuming Apple sells about 250,000 songs a day through its stores, that implies annual sales of about $90 million, a figure that Enderle said could rise considerably once the service is available to Windows computer users, which Apple said will happen later this year.
Apple hasn't released any figures on how much it spent to develop and engineer the online music store, an effort it launched a year and a half ago. Bureau Report