Apple Sells A Million Songs in Debut Week

Scrameustache writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store sold over one million songs during its first week. Over half of the songs were purchased as albums, and over half of the 200,000 songs offered on the iTunes Music Store were purchased at least once. Those new iPods are selling like hotcakes too..."

Comments

Another surprising thing

[metamatic]

Another thing I find surprising is how many people are raving about the sound quality of AAC, when in my own tests it's significantly worse than MP3 encoded with LAME at the same average bitrate.

I don't mean subtly worse, either. I mean AAC is so awful you'd have to be deaf to not hear the distortion. If you want to verify for yourself, encode Fischerspooner's "Emerge", and listen to the section starting about 38 seconds in.

Yet loads of Mac users are deleting all their MP3s and re-ripping to AAC. Talk about a victory for Steve Jobs and Apple! Get everyone to put their music collection in MPEG-4 format, and you won't see them switching to Windows Media any time soon. I suspect this is a big part of the motivation behind the store, the iPod firmware update, and the new iTunes--get MPEG-4 out there before Microsoft can kill it.