More Than Three Billion Tunes Served
The first thing I thought of when I saw Apple's news about the iTunes Store news: It's beginning to rival McDonald's, which once tracked how many millions, and later billions, of burgers were sold beneath its trademark Golden Arches.
ITunes is still at the point where it's tracking, and touting, its sales--and no wonder: ITunes now sits squarely in third among music retailers in the U.S. Amazon and Target are behind them (curiously, Apple's release doesn't note who's ahead of them).
More than three billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from iTunes. That's from a song catalog over five million tunes deep; and not counting the, presumably, dramatically smaller sales numbers for TV and movie downloads. Apple is using data from NPD Group's MusicWatch survey, which it says captures consumer-reported, past week unit purchases equivalized so that one CD equals 12 tracks.
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They should follow this up with a news story about how the music industry is losing all sorts of money.
Jeez, 3 billion, that's A LOT of money for basically free. They don't have to press CDs, create insert booklets, give money to a middle-man (wholesaler), give money to a retailer, or even pay for rent in a store. All they gotta do is buy a few computers, get an ISP and then ROLL in the money!!!!!
Disgusting. And now for 30 cents more, you can buy your music DRM-free. You sould get DRM-free music for the original $1 per song, they're making a huge profit no matter what.
(And just to think, a few short years ago the record labels REFUSED to sell their music online. They assumed everyone who owns a computer is a thief. I guess we showed them by giving them $3 billion for music that you can only copy a few times, and can only play on IPODs. Unless you wanna convert the songs to MP3 and risk a lawsuit from Apple.)