I'll be a guest on ABC World News Tonight Thursday evening for a segment on the significance of a milestone for Apple's iTunes Music Store: the one billionth song was purchased and downloaded today. Will the success of iTMS and Apple's iPod foster a more competitive digital music marketplace, with more choice for music fans? Or should consumers brace themselves for a future in which music and movies are locked up in proprietary, non-interoperable systems that limit our freedom to enjoy tunes we've legally obtained? Link to ABC World News homepage, here's a related news synopsis on the ABC.com site. Here's a press release from Apple about the billionth download (a Coldplay song, btw).
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Reader comment: Jason Schultz says,
Worth noting also that it's taken Apple about three years to sell a billion songs, which is a drop in the bucket compared to CD sales and especially compared to P2P traffic, even today. So while this is nice for Apple, it's still not showing signs of replacing the existing music distribution mechanisms.
Reader comment: Jonathan Tilney says,
Read this item and the comment by Jason that this was after three years. While it is correct, it should be remembered that it took iTunes 27 months to record its first 500 million sales and only 7 months to do the second 500 million. Its growth is looking like becoming exponential.
Reader comment: Chad Arsenault says,
It's also worth noting that iTunes is providing the consumer with much better service than CD distributors, by allowing a la carte delivery of the product.
When we hear a song we like, we no longer drive to our local music stores and pay upwards of $12 to purchase a CD full of other songs we may or may not enjoy. Instead, we hop online and pay a dollar for the specific product we want to purchase.It may take a little time, and there will certainly always be those who hold out against purely digitized media (we all have friends who listen to nothing if its not cut into vinyl); but eventually, as long as online content distributors continue to provide the consumer with exactly what they want at a fair price, CD sales will decline to the point where they are no longer the primary distribution mechanism. The record companies may whine and snivel, but it's not like we don't expect that from them anyway.
