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.'"

Audiophile?

[Götz]

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.

Re:Yay, math!

[Aqua OS X]

he could always buy TV shows

Why does everyone focus on the iPods?

[TCQuad]

Beyond the iTMS certificate, the iPods and iMac, the prize includes a 4 year scholarship created in the winner's name [apple.com] 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.

Audiophile?

[QuietLagoon]

the lucky audiophile

No audiophile worthy of the appellation would download an overly-compressed pop tune.

:)

Re:The RIAA was right

[91degrees]

This is something I was thinking about the other day... The RIAA resisted any attempts to allow mp3s to be sold, initally (I think) because they thought it would compete with their CD business and later because of fears of piracy. They didn't want to lose control of their product. So iTunes came along and offered DRM. Unfortunately, iTines is the only online music store that works with the most popular brand of player (the iPod). This means Apple gets to call the shots.

So, having avoided giving up control of their songs to the pirates, they've given up control of their songs to Apple. They could possibly get control back by letting other companies sell mp3s, thus meaning there's competition for the iPod market, but they're never going to do that.

Re:The RIAA was right

[jimicus]

Because they can't do as they wish it's not viable.

Put like that, it rather looks like the business model is more about controlling the distribution of a product rather than the product itself.

Sounds like organised crime - Prohibition era, organised crime distributes alcohol, makes money and gets very tetchy about someone else competing with them. Today, organised crime distributes music^H^H^H^H^Hdrugs, makes money and gets very tetchy about someone else competing with them.

Re:1060 GB IPod?

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

no, perception of sound is not linear. 10 iPods will make him go deaf twice as fast as 1 iPod.

Re:Yay, math!

[sirambrose]

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.

Contribution of iTMS to iPod success seems small

[adam1101]

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.

Re:Contribution of iTMS to iPod success seems smal

[GlassHeart]

hmm. I have 140 tunes on my 2gb (1.8gb without the marketing speak) Nano at it's full. 8 of those tunes are 1 hour long each so I suppose they can count as 10 tunes each. All at around 192kbps.

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.