Over at Boing Boing, Cory points to a 14-month old website that discovers the apparently shocking truth: people don't buy that many songs from the iTunes Music Store.
As of April 15 [2004], Apple had sold roughly 60 million iTunes and 3 million iPods. That's about 21 songs per iPod. For perspective, the smallest iPods hold 1,000 songs, and some hold 10,000 songs. So, when people fill up those iPods, where does all the music come from?
Fast forward to June 2005, and the figures have changed, but aren't really that different: we're now heading for half a billion songs sold on iTunes, with something like 16 million iPods (of all persuasions) sold worldwide. That something like 31 songs per iPod: an improvement to be sure, but hardly a world-changing amount.
But the figures don't really carry much meaning unless you start thinking about how they fit in with a trend.
The iTunesperipod site, which is lobbying for controlled, legalised filesharing, suggests that most digital music is - no surprises - from filesharing.
I disagree with that thesis. Most people, I think, have a legacy collection of CDs (and vinyl, perhaps) that makes up the vast majority of their digital music collection. Perhaps they're adding to it using the collections of friends (filesharing of a sort) but I don't think that most iPod purchasers are heavy users of the illegal networks.
So here's my point: a majority of music being played on iPods today has been bought. And yes, digital downloads are a tiny proportion of the music on digital players today: but they won't be so insignificant tomorrow.
Over the course of time, and for a variety of reasons, downloads are likely to overtake physical sales.
Over the course of time, you will only buy a limited number of digital music players. But you will buy a far greater proportion of digital music.
I've no doubt that the money I've spent on CDs far outweighs the money I've spent on hi-fi equipment. And that pattern is likely to be true for the digital age, even if it's not there yet.
Now, Apple doesn't make a huge amount of money from iTunes Music Store, but that isn't the point: it's using ITMS to dominate the market and hook people into its brand - the oft-quoted figure is that it holds around 70% of legal music downloads.
Apple is already starting to feel the pinch in some areas - with the Shuffle losing market share - but the growth for ITMS continues while the cost of that growth shrinks. And if it comes up with a movie store, as many of us anticipate, there's even more for it to try and control.
So yes, the proportion of digitally-downloaded music on iPods is small: but don't think that figure tells the whole story.
