Forrester back pedals on iTunes plummeting comments

BEAN COUNTERS at Forrester hit the headlines when they told the world+dog that the Apple jukebox iTunes was going down the gurgler.

Now it seems that the outfit is backpeddling claiming it said no such thing and it was only the evil media who saw its comments in that way. Writing on the company site here, a spokesForrester said that all it did was pen a little report about iPods and iTunes based on credit card transactions and publicly stated Apple data.

The spokesForrester admits that the credit card transaction data shows a real drop between the January post-holiday peak and the rest of the year, but now says it's not possible to read from these runes that iTunes was in trouble.

However when the media saw Forrester's numbers it was wont to describe them using words like "sales collapsing", "dropping" and "plummeting".

Then Apple got on the blower and were mightily miffed at Forrester, particularly as Apple's stock price really did "plummet" on the back of the news.

Forrester now claims that its figures meant that iTune sales were levelling off, but Apple is not in trouble because it makes most of its cash from iPods.

While Forrester is still blaming the media for its change of heart, the spokesForrester said that a lot of the trouble was caused by Apple not giving it a decent comment when the analysts ran the figures past them in the first place.

He said that Jobs' Mob's unwillingness to comment on the record or off about anything they're working on or any industry results beyond the basic statistics just fueled speculation. µ