A Billion Downloads, and Counting

Someone around here noticed that at www.Apple.com, there’s a restless counter that reads 997,978,240–no, 997,978,534-–no, 997,978,986…and shortly (Apple can’t tell us when) it will hit 1,000,000,000. 

A billion songs, or podcasts, or videos, all downloaded since Apple began its iTunes website and changed the face of media. 

There was a time–this is so 20th century—-when, if you liked a piece of music, you went to a store and bought it on a disc or tape.  Sure, there was mail-order, and by the 1990s there was mail-order over the web, but the principle was the same: you ended up with a physical thing, an album of one sort or another, which you put in a player or on a turntable (turntable?) in order to listen. 

People bought into this system, but also objected to it, especially if they had to spend $18 on an album in order to get the one or two cuts they really liked.  Along came Internet music-download sites, and the music industry all but collapsed.

Apple did not invent the mp3 download, but it made it legal and lucrative.  As of October, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported that iTunes accounted for 82 percent of the legal downloads in the United States.  Digital music sales were only six percent of music sales overall, but they grew from $220 million to $790 million in a year, and haven’t stopped.

There’s a reason for the term “disruptive technology.”  Over the same period, CD sales dropped 3.4 percent in unit volume, and 6.7 percent in dollar value. 

We’ve done a piece for the WNT webcast, which you’ll be able to find HERE. 

Or (forgive the plug) you can download the webcast on iTunes.

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All Thumbs

We did a piece yesterday about the explosion in text messaging—-large enough that Virgin Mobile, one of Britain’s largest cell-phone carriers, is warning people to watch out for repetitive stress injuries from typing messages on the keypads of their phones.

This is more of an issue in Europe and the Pacific Rim than in the U.S. (we have more personal computers, and fewer cell phones, per person), but when you multiply a small problem (sore thumbs) by a big number (3.8 million cases of repetitive stress reported in the U.K. last year) you get something worth a bit of attention. 

I’ll fully confess I snickered at the story at first, but we’ve had it HERE since last night, and it’s been one of our ten most-read stories.