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iTunes Music Store hits Billionth Download
SirWraith writes "In case anyone hasn't realized Apple has had a counter going up to a billion for a few weeks now. Apparently last night, they hit the mark. From ABC News: 'Apple says Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Mich., was the lucky audiophile who downloaded "Speed of Sound" by Brit pop band Coldplay, giving the Cupertino, Calif., company bragging rights to the 10-figure milestone.
Thanks to a generous prize package from Apple, Ostrovsky will now use a $10,000 iTunes music card to keep those downloads flowing on his new 20-inch iMac computer, and listen to his favorite tunes on one of the 10 60GB iPods.'"
$10,000 / $0.99 = 10,101.01, so he's going to have to pay $0.98 of his OWN MONEY if he wants to actually claim that .01 of a song.
DON'T BELIEVE APPLE, if they offer you $10,000 open your eyes and see it's a SCAM to get YOUR MONEY!
Hardly lucky. He paid for a Coldplay song and is probably comatose now. No number of iPods will wake him up.
This leaps to mind when I found out that the Billionth song was a Coldplay song:
David: You know how I know that you're gay?
Cal: How? Cuz you're gay? and you can tell who other gay people are.
David: You know how I know you're gay?
Cal: How?
David: You like Coldplay.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Do you think people were actually trying to be the 1 billionth? I mean, once it was a few thousand short were people buying a lot of songs to try and be the billionth? It seemed to pay off for one person if they were. Our local TV news agency said that the winner got "a 20 inch computer".
Downloadable music isn't a viable music model.
I think the term 'audiophile' does not fit here. Audiophiles buy expensive HiFi equipment and don't listen to 128kbit AAC from the Apple store. Especially as many people can hear the encoding artefacts on good equipment. But I must admit that I cannot hear the difference with the crappy earbuds that came with my iPod.
In other news...
Free music downloads reached 80 bajillion last week. Music companies are rich, complaining, putting out crappy stuff like Coldplay.
he could always buy TV shows
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
At least your girlfriend has musical taste, too bad her ability to choose a mate is so tragically impaired.
Beyond the iTMS certificate, the iPods and iMac, the prize includes a 4 year scholarship created in the winner's name to a "world renowned institute of music" selected by Apple. So, while all the loot he gets is nice, he's not the only winner. Actually, given the price of tuition, he's not even the biggest winner.
It's 99 cents, not 0.99 cents.
990M is a nice bit of income, but most of it [1] is paid out again. Apple doesn't say how profitable the iTMS is, just that it's "above even".
1: 10% of the cost of a song goes to the artist, 55% to the record company. Artists who do business with Apple directly, get 70%. Most of the remainder pays for the hardware and bandwidth.
Rumor has it that Apple's profit is 8%, or $80M after 1 Gsongs.
Who *really* cares what you (or anyone else, for that matter) has to say about what someone downloads?
I'm gunna keep downloading the tracks I like, no matter who "performs" them, whether you like it or not.
Snob.
bork bork bork!
No audiophile worthy of the appellation would download an overly-compressed pop tune.
I'm glad I'm old - I've never heard Coldplay, even once. I sure won't seek it out now!
while true at one point, not true anymore. Apple makes a modest profit on the majority of content they sell via itms
no, perception of sound is not linear. 10 iPods will make him go deaf twice as fast as 1 iPod.
Everyone else - 100,000
Soul Amp (My Band) 6
Actually I am stoked about iTunes/Mp3 and iPods....as a indie musician, self producing with a home grown label, iTunes allows us to collect 65 cents per song. Direct to the the band...
Unfortunately without the big money for PR and payola (yes Apple probably takes payola too...despite claims otherwise, I think they call them marketing fees or "services") We are relegated to being just 13 songs in a sea of millions. Thus sales have been slow. But...that can change in a heartbeat as anyone who listens to music can see.
So...feel free to scope iTunes and search for Soul Amp...I need another guitar amplifier (VOX Ac-30 or Matchless) and a leslie for our 1958 Hammond M3 organ.
Also for people who refuse to pay for music until guilt finally takes hold after scamming every song ever recorded, we have tracks of tunes we are working on for our next disk on our website. Hep yer self...I say whay wait until a rash breaks out from the guilt of free downloading...by indie music from iTunes. The bands actually get the bulk of the money. 65 cents of 99 is pretty damn good. Most bands that get mp3 blogged are on iTunes.
http://soul-amp.com/
Poor guys owning razorback servers probably hit the mark long ago. And instead of fame they got closed.
Oh wait.
my sstream of consciousness
the billionth song was Coldplay i.e. someone cool (i suppose still) and "hip", what a shame it wasn't Uncle Pete's Rog Tog Bimbo Rambo Band or some horrific 70s country music. I mean, that would not have looked as cool in the press release would it? ;)
Ignoring your poor math, there are several other major problems with your argument. Your argument assumes that the owner of the iPod doesn't pay for their music and is looking at how much it would cost to re-purchase their entire collection of mp3 files.
The purpose of an iPod is not to be full, it is to carry the owner's entire music collection. When I bought my 20gb iPod, I only owned 10gb of music. I have no intention of attempting to fill it up. I'll just buy music when I feel like it. Assuming that the usable life of an iPod is 5 years, I'll probably fill it up about when it dies. If I buy music faster than that and fill up the iPod in 2 years, I will go buy a larger one with space to fit my growing music collection.
In my experience, buying an iPod is reasonable exactly because it costs so little compared to the retail value of the music it holds. The value of an iPod to me is proportional to the value of the music that it allows me to carry, but it was priced at a flat rate of $300. If I had 150 albums, an iPod costs only $2 per cd. Assuming that each cd costs $15, the iPod costs only 13% of the cost of the music that it initially held. As I buy more music this ratio will drop towards 6.5%. Essentially, an iPod has value to me because I buy cds. For someone who doesn't buy cds, an iPod will not be attractive because it will "require" them to buy music.
Buying an iPod is sort of like buying insurance for a cd collection because the iPod allows carrying a large music collection without risking loosing the music. Carrying a $300 music player is much safer than carrying $2,250 in cds.
Jobs anounced last month that they've sold 42 million iPods, so they've sold on average less than 24 songs per iPod. Even the lowest capacity Shuffle holds 120 songs. If we assume an average capacity of 2GB (500 songs) per iPod (the majority of sales are probably the cheaper low capacity units), less than 5% of the aggregate iPod capacity is filled with iTMS songs.
This seems to contradict the oft repeated claims that the iPod ties you to iTMS, or that iTMS is a major contributor to the iPod's success.
"Speed of Sound," by Coldplay.
Figures.
Fucking Coldplay.
It's the top of the line iMac, and the highest-end Mac with an Intel CPU.
The 10 iPods is weird though. I'd rather have one of the iPod commercial girls.
-mkb
I wish I can put this another way, but your math stinks.
Apple states clearly that "song capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding". Your one-hour long tunes do not count as ten, but 22.5 ((60 min / 4 min) * (192 kbps / 128 kbps)). Each of your 4-minute 192 kbps songs would also count as 1.5 each. So, let's say you have 132 4-minute 192 kbps songs and 8 60-minute 192 kbps songs, that's 378 "Apple songs". We can make a more accurate estimate if you provide a more accurate account of the songs you're loading.
In any case, you can argue that an "Apple song" is an unrealistic measure (it is, by the way, a bitrate reasonable enough to sell one billion songs in) or whatever else you want to complain about, but loading longer and higher bitrate songs and whining that you can't get the advertised song count really just means you either refuse to read or can't perform arithmetic.
Also, I suggest you avoid playing your iPod at full volume to protect your hearing, not to mention get better battery life out of your iPod.