Apple has hit one billion songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store since it was launched in April 2003: the magic number was hit "at roughly 12:38am EST on Thursday morning" (thanks, The Unofficial Apple Weblog) - that's 5am in the morning of Thursday. (Which is intriguing, because when we looked at about 7am it seemed to still be grinding on. More in a moment).
The billionth song "Speed of Sound" was purchased as part of Coldplay's X&Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan and as the grand prize winner he will receive a 20-inch iMac®, 10 fifth generation iPods and a $10,000 gift card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School of Music in his name to commemorate this milestone.
(One could say dangerous things about what sort of music the scholarship should avoid, but...)
"I hope that every customer, artist and music company executive takes a moment today to reflect on what we've achieved together during the past three years," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Over one billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the internet."
Read it all here.
Apple of course has an aim in this, besides just making money: to keep its single-price mode, against the urging of the music labels to introduce tiered pricing. Apple (well, Steve Jobs) argues that people can understand single-pricing models. (It's true - ever been in those shops where everything costs a pound?) The labels argue that music of different vintage and demand deserves different pricing. Point being that there's no way of proving which one is right; but Apple does have a nice round result to show off.
Now the calculations. One billion songs downloaded (note: not all paid for; there have been free singles and other giveaways) since April 28 2003. That's 1,000 million in 1032 days - a simple average of 968,000 songs per day.
More recently the song download rate had increased to somewhere between three and four million per day across all the different regions of "iTunes Stores" (a strange concept, imposed by the record industry). But we thought that something intriguing happened in the last few hours before the billion mark. We'll seek confirmation, but at the start of the week we confidently expected that the billion mark would be passed on Wednesday around noon GMT. Instead, it took about 18 hours more. Were people holding off purchasing songs in the faint hope of being the ones who got the magic billion?
Meanwhile, there's still plenty of room for the companies selling subscriptions. Apple still hasn't shown any interest in getting into that market. But it's early days yet.
Oh, and one more thing. The billion sales seemed to be achieved without any extended downtime, unless we missed something. Interesting how we now take such reliability for granted in this web world.
