Christmas iPods' rush, iTunes Crush

With the sales of Apple’s iPod doing good in the holiday season, for the third consecutive year, a whole brigade of iPod owners flocked the company’s iTunes music store over the holiday causing the pace of downloads to decline.

Christmas day saw heavy rush at Apple’s site as the users tried to download the iTunes client to their PCs or Macs. The traffic rose 413 per cent as compared to the same day last year. Error messages were prompted and users were made to wait 20 minutes or more for a single song.

Visits to Apple store went up 110 per cent against Christmas day 2005, according to online market researcher, Hitwise.

Apple's technical forum for iTunes saw urgent help messages being posted by the weary users who complained that the system was unable to process their request to download songs and videos. Some also grumbled that they were not being allowed into the store.

Apple Computer Inc. Wednesday refused to comment on the problem associated with the slowdown. Also, it could not be determined that how many people were affected by the slowdowns and whether a fix has been issued by the company or not.

However, the most likely reason as some analysts stated was the rush of too many people with holiday iPods and iTunes gift cards trying to access the site at once.

"It's actually created more positive buzz among analysts. Traffic was so great it blew up the site," said Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. "If anything it could be a positive demand was better than they were expecting."

Rivals like Microsoft Zune, also reported as increase in the number of visits and downloads on the Christmas day but figures of other players in the iPod-dominated market stood nowhere in competition.

"For the third holiday season in a row, the iPod has been the must-have Christmas gift," Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, said in a statement. "Competitive offerings have not yet succeeded in capturing the attention of music listeners, and the surge in visits to the Apple Store shows that iPod owners are also engaged in filling and accessorizing their new devices."