Over 5 billion songs have been sold through iTunes music service Apple announced today. It also notes that iTunes has over 50,000 movies downloaded either as purchases or rentals every day, making it the premier online movie store.
It's hardly a surprise that iTunes is such a dominant force in the online market, after all iTunes beat out physical retailers in January and February to become the primary music retailer in the US. But still, 5 billion is a huge number. That would mean that, on average, each of the 8 million songs offered on iTunes would be downloaded 625 times.
The movie download numbers are even more startling to me though. Call me old fashioned, but I like having a physical DVD, or at least I don't like clogging up my hard drive with downloaded video files. But I must be one of the few left, given 50,000 movie downloads per day.
More and more we're seeing that physical media is already on the way out, and this iTunes announcement just helps to solidify the online force that is now driving the music industry.
