Help me with my math! I gave a talk yesterday at U of O, as I mention in the last post, and one of my slides was about how as of March 08 iTunes had sold 170 million iPods according to Wikipedia. As of last September Apple said it had sold 2 billion songs. Apple announced today that it has sold 5 billion songs.
If I divide 170 million iPods by 2 billion songs it works out to be 11.7 songs purchased per iPod. If I update that to 5 billion songs and say three months later Apple has sold another 10 million iPods, that number becomes 5 billion divided by 180 million = 27.7 songs purchased per iPod. That is incredibly low and of course must take into account that people load up the iPod with music from their CD collection and of course their are those who download free and legal MP3s from sites like The Moose and maybe even find illegal downloads too. Let me know if my math is off – it was my weakest subject in class…..
Your math seems a-ok.
according to this article from Brietbart: (http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D91DB6RO2&show_article=1) the world’s population is currently around 6.7 billion. Using the ol’ trusty iPhone calc… that’s .7462 songs per person on this planet, and .0268 ipods per person. Apple seriously needs to step it up if they want to claim world domination.
Seriously, I’ve only purchased 10-15 songs from iTunes in my whole life (before i knew better). The whole FairPlay/DRM thing, you know. The rest are from eMusic, Amazon, personal CD collection, website freebies (like ‘moose) and the occasional… ahem… “preview” album. Just like you described… I think i’m a typical digital music listener.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:09 pm@erik, yeah I purchase more from the Amazon download site these days as it’s DRM free and twice the quality 256kb….meanwhile from the London Times Music sales fall to their lowest level in over twenty years
June 19th, 2008 at 2:54 pm@dave, I paid over $100 to see Radiohead for 2.5 hours in Dallas last month, enough to purchase their entire back catalog. Whilst new acts may be unable to pay the mortgage, established ones just shift revenue streams. As for the future, does this mean recording artists will all be starving recording artists?
June 20th, 2008 at 8:15 am