Submission + - Is Apple making bank on undelivered iTunes songs?
kingpetey writes: "Ever give an iTunes song as a gift? The folks at this blog did an experiment where they sent 20 songs (K-Fed, which is hilarious in itself) to different contacts and tracked how many made it successfully. A few failed, but Apple didn't notify them of the failure. If it happened to me, I'd be — how you say — royally pissed. They describe the experiment here:
a nk-on-undelivered-itunes-songs"
The full article is at http://www.simpletechnology.net/is-apple-making-bSo what happened to the 20 songs we gifted? iTunes had a twenty-five percent failure rate: fifteen of the gifted songs arrived while five never made it. However, Apple took the full price each of the 20 songs without alerting us about the failed deliveries: no refund, no second try, nothing....
This little experiment begs the question, how much money is Apple making on undelivered music? Let's say that only two percent of the one billion songs downloaded last year were "gifted" songs, that would add up to two million songs. Now, that's hardly a drop in Apple's bucket of revenue, but if a twenty-five percent failure rate is the norm, then 500,000 songs go undelivered while Apple makes around $495,000 for failing to deliver songs.