iTunes Music Store breaks 200 million downloads
By Peter Rojas 
posted December 16th 2004 3:21PM
posted December 16th 2004 3:21PM
We're definitely not going to be doing another post like this until they hit 500 million or a billion or Stevie J. assumes his rightful place as lord and master of the known universe, but Apple's iTunes Music Store just sold another hundred million downloads. That makes it 200 million total since they launched in April of last year, but the crazy part is that it took them just under 15 months to sell the first hundred million and all of five months to sell the second hundred million. (The first hundred million is always the hardest, isn't it?) No big time giveaway or anything this time around, but we're trying to make up for that.
Make up for it!? Are you going to sing to us?
Trying to make up for that? The last link in the article has this "http:///" as its target. What are you doing to make up for it?
yea the link is broken or something
don't want to get the pod people all mad, but real does sell songs that will work on (some) of the ipods, and they are higher quality, 192 vs. 128, the highest quality of all the stores actually.
I'm interested in how many were actually purchased. Don't forget that last spring they gave away 100,000,000 of those. They also have 1 free download every week. With over 3,000,000 iPod units sold in the US, that equals roughly 33 songs per iPod owner.
Come on people, those things will hold 5000+ songs. Everyone must be ripping all their store bought CD's. Who needs iTunes?
Tim,they didn't give away 100m last spring. They offered that number on Pepsi bottle caps, but the distribution was so poor that many were turning up in stores after the deadline, a lot of people didn't know what to do with them, or didn't care. Only 5m were redeemed and those 5m counted towards the 200m total. The free downloads don't count because they're not paid for, they're, erm, free.
I've lost count of the number of people asking me about my iPod who think that in order to get music onto an iPod, they have to purchase it from the iTunes Music Store, not realising that you can just rip music from all your CDs.
"I've lost count of the number of people asking me about my iPod who think that in order to get music onto an iPod, they have to purchase it from the iTunes Music Store, not realising that you can just rip music from all your CDs."
We iPod-owning Antipodeans don't seem to get asked these questions in ITMS-free Australia :-/
itunes isnt just a music store,
its a jukebox for your mac that syncs with your ipod.
itunes is plenty useful without the store.
besides that - aac 128 quality is supposed to be equal to reals 192.
besided that, real player sucks and is a crappy company in my opinion. crappy streaming, crappy player, and crappy biz ethics.
"real does sell songs that will work on (some) of the ipods, and they are higher quality, 192 vs. 128, the highest quality of all the stores actually."
No, it's not, allofmp3.com has full CD quality downloads and it's about 30 times cheaper too.
I get people asking me what music can go on your iPod, they all ask, "you have to get it from Kazaa hey?".
They ponder in mystery when I explain the wonders of their already existing CD collection.
And, yes, they don't know what the iTMS is in Australia.
"No, it's not, allofmp3.com has full CD quality downloads and it's about 30 times cheaper too."
Because it's a completely illegal service. I'm not convinced that individual downloaders are breaking any laws, but Allofmp3.com almost certainly is (when the RIAA sues individual users, they're suing them for sharing, not for downloading, because it's the "copyrights" you're infringing - meaning you are distributing copies without authorization). So you may technically be ok downloading from them - or maybe not, IANAL - but you're on questionable moral ground if you actually believe in paying artists. The license that Allofmp3.com claims to have doesn't exist, and the organization they claim to have it from has said they're not authorized to license anyone to do what Allofmp3.com does anyway.
Maybe you don't care, in which case do whatever you want - I'm not gonna call the RIAA police on you. I'm just sayin'.
Of course, what Allofmp3.com does is exactly what I want a pay service to do (low prices, rip in a variety of non-DRM'd formats, pay per bandwidth used rather than per song), and if any such comparable service legally started operation here I'd sign up in a second. I'll never use iTMS or any other pay-per-song service with low-quality DRM'd files. I still rip all my CD's the old fashioned way for now (and I still buy new CD's to rip), mp3, no DRM, fairly high bit rates, VBR, using the latest LAME codec. Allofmp3.com's pretty much got all that exactly right, it's just a shame that it's not a legally sanctioned service.