Apple's iTunes hits 5 billion mark

The path to world domination is paved in round numbers, especially big ones like this: 5 billion.

The face of the iTunes store.

(Credit: Apple)

That's the number of songs that have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store, Apple said Thursday. (Actually, for the record, the press release says "over 5 billion.")

That shouldn't be surprising, of course. Apple's iTunes store has long overshadowed the rest of the music download scene. Rivals have launched many an assault, but even e-commerce competitors as savvy as Amazon.com still face quite an uphill battle--sales of songs at 9-month-old AmazonMP3, the No. 2 digital music store, are only a tenth the volume of those at iTunes, according to market researcher NPD Group.

Apple is, in fact, the largest music retailer in the United States, period, having pushed past Wal-mart Stores earlier this year. And it seems to be making a healthy profit from its iTunes operations. No wonder many a politician is toying with the notion of taxing digital downloads.

The company also said on Tuesday that iTunes customers are toting up purchases and rentals of more than 50,000 movies per day.

[Shuelin]

I started using itunes about 6 months ago when I received an 8GB ipod nano, I'm never going back to Windows Media Player.

http://thegooglehouse.blogspot.com

[ballmerisanape]

Nicely done.

[streamOG]

DRM Rules the day once again. Apple, using DRM, outsells Amazon 10 to 1. It's obvious that consumers don't care about DRM. If they did the numbers would be the other away around.

[TomMariner]

Jobs is a genius. Forget the techie stuff -- the guy and his crew created an industry that was there before but no one noticed or found a way to really monetize it. The guy virtually founded Silicon Valley, did amazing things with Next, then got others to pony up serious bucks to found Pixar and out-Disneyed Disney. And now IPod coupled with ITunes, the IPhone,

I am not fan of Steve's early life, but when you have accomplished as much for his investors and his customers as he has you can do just about anything you please. Congrats Steve and the Apple team. (I am betting that Steve doesn't do it all unless he is better at chip design and with a soldering iron that I think he is.)

[Seaspray0]

Which makes music distribution a monopoly of apple. And since they refuse to allow MP3 makers the ability to license the digital rights management on those songs, they are abusing their position as a monopoly by restricting the ability to play those songs only on an ipod. Yes, apple is just as bad as microsoft when they had the browser war in the 90's.

[Getrealpeople]

Any iTunes song can be burned to CD and shared. Also, DRM can be removed with free and inexpensive applications. Apple is not parlaying dominance in one sector into forced usage of a sister product, like Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer. Both iTunes and the iPod were introduced together in an age where free file sharing was flourishing. That both became enormously successful speaks volumes about the quality, ease of use, and functionality of Apple's entire line. It also confirms that most people are honest and want to do the right thing by their favorite artists. Someone just needed to introduce an intuitive and fashionable way to make legal downloading appealing. If Apple does enjoy a monopoly today, it is because they clearly have the best products, not an illegal use of leverage.

[matthewadavid]

Seaspray,

You can opt out of DRM in iTunes and have straight AAC format. Many MP3 players (including the Zune, I believe) support the AAC format. I do not think this is a reflection of the browser wars. What you have is a closed iTunes music management (not store) and iPod system. DRM free music can be purchased from the iTunes Store, imported into Windows Media Player and played through an AAC compliant device. You can also right click on any DRM free purchase and have iTunes convert the file into an MP3. Maybe you need to talk to the music companies that demanded DRM in the first place.

[jypeterson]

Seaspray0:
Apple does not allow third parties to license the DRM because it cannot control the quality of the experience. This is an anomoly in the CE and PC world -- consumers like things that work. Why else is the iPhone satisfaction rate at 90% and the Mac satisfaction rate is at 75% (both highest in their categories by a long shot).

I do not see that Apple is abusing their power by holding the market share. They have always sold their content this way, and they have had plenty of competition as well. Just because no one else can design and sell a product line that works so well and consumers love means that they hold an abusive monopoly. Look at the failed business plans around this: Plays for Sure, Zune Marketplace, Sony Music Store, Napster (legal version), MTV's Urge, WallMart's Music Store, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The music store offerings and music players together do not work well together. They are error ridden, un-intuitive, and non-consumer friendly. Who buys things with points instead of dollars? Especially since it is a gimick to trick the consumer!

If someone creates a compelling product and online store tied together, they might have something. Until this happens no one will be able to get close to Apple. Consumers speak with their wallets!

Apple does not restrict the compatible files on their devices, as long as it is an AAC or MP3 codec. Apple is only restricted to sell DRM files because of the content owner's own requirements. Apple would love to sell DRM free content, Jobs has even said so and EMI is the only music studio to offer DRM free content on iTunes.

[thelemurking]

I bet TPB gets that in 6 months

99 cents for a single song is ridiculous! It's DRM and annoying and they charge your more for songs without DRM. It amazes me that it's essentially $1 per song when there is no distribution, no physical media or any of the other things that regulate the price of a CD. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great to have a set price across the board and iTunes did a great job changing the market in that aspect... I just think even Apple is no different than the big record companies when it comes to raping the wallets of consumers. Think about it, that's $5 billion dollars for Apple and the record companies for nothing more than bandwidth and server storage.

[MacHeads]

First and foremost the Itunes store is aimed at Macs connected to Ipods , Mac users tend to believe into paying their sharewared and dont pirate a thing even though they can perfectly choose to do so ...

Another thing to consider is that Mac Users belive in a legal distribution of music for a fair price , sorry but PC users in their majority just do not think that way , piracy is still very much alive .

The DRM around the ITMS is far from constraining and allows artists to benefit from revenues that would otherwise vanish ,on the matter of interoperability you can get your ITMS stuff back to a CD-RW and rip it back or go Itunes Plus. I do not see Apple's ITMS as a monopoly per se , it is everyone else failures to enter the buisiness on both the mac and pc side that made it so .

[KevinK]

MacHeads -- the original iTunes was certainly designed for MAC users, however the world being what it is today that is no longer the case. I think you will find something >90% of iTunes customers are on PCs. I would also assume that MACs would have much the same capability to download illegal MP3s as PCs, probably the preponderance of illegal downloaders were pc users just by virtue of the difference in the number of Windows machines as opposed to MACs . It seems unlikely to me that a MAC user is necessarily any more moral than a PC user, and this is probably totally unsubstantiable. I have been a fan of Apple for years, bought an iPod as soon as iTunes became available to the PC world, and currently own a 160GB Classic. I have a number of PCs mostly running XP and one that also runs Linux, and I like Apple too. I don't pirate music.

[KevinK]

MacHeads -- the original iTunes was certainly designed for MAC users, however the world being what it is today that is no longer the case. I think you will find something >90% of iTunes customers are on PCs. I would also assume that MACs would have much the same capability to download illegal MP3s as PCs, probably the preponderance of illegal downloaders were pc users just by virtue of the difference in the number of Windows machines as opposed to MACs . It seems unlikely to me that a MAC user is necessarily any more moral than a PC user, and this is probably totally unsubstantiable. I have been a fan of Apple for years, bought an iPod as soon as iTunes became available to the PC world, and currently own a 160GB Classic. I have a number of PCs mostly running XP and one that also runs Linux, and I like Apple too. I don't pirate music.

[Seaspray0]

I'm not just a single person in this case; the EU is looking into this, and I'm surprised I haven't seen any lawsuits in the USA over this so far. Apple holds a monopoly on music distribution. Do you deny this? Music which contains DRM. Do you deny that the music you pay $1 for doesn't come with DRM? Apple refuses to license the DRM to other MP3 makers. Do you deny this? Will that DRM encoded music play on other MP3 players? No. Does it matter if you can use software to convert it to another format? Not according to the arguement used by Netscape against Microsoft where even something as simple as having a shortcut on the desktop was as huge deal. What apple is doing now is abusing the power of a monoply. Are macboi's really this blind? Obviously.

[KevinK]

MacHeads, what you say about iTunes and the iPod was true 5 years ago, however I think if you look at the statistics today you will probably find that >90% of all iTunes users are on PCs. I bought my first iPod shortly after Apple released the first version of iTunes for PC. Equating PC users with piracy and Apple users with honesty is specious, first of all Apple has less than 10% of the US market share, and considerably less than that world wide, and I find it hard to believe that no one using a MAC ever downloaded music illegally. I think could find that a comparable percentage of MAC users and PC users (have) engage(d) in piracy, but because of the relatively small number of MACs compared to PCs the numbers are much larger on the PC side. I like my 160GB iPod Classic, and the previous firewire 5GB 1st gen I had - neither have ever been plugged into a MAC. Sales quantities of iPods far outstrips MACs so obviously most are NOT used with MACs.

( I will say that buying that new Classic with buggy firmware and Apple's utter lack of transparency on this issue was not too cool. Two exchanged to a firmware bug that resulted in dead battery in 12 hrs and one with a trashed HD. I finally found on Apple Forums that there was a bug and waited for the update, but Apple was not forthcoming about the battery discharge issue caused by the firmware bug in v1.02 firmware.)

[dfstone1]

I don't understand why people complain about DRM. Just burn it to a CD if the electronic version bothers you that much.

[austinchu]

Apple rules. Apparently there is a lot controversy involving DRM. In my opinion, I think Apple is doing it right, at least their sales are through the roof. That amounts to something. I work for a company that manages and tracks gift cards, and itunes is moving fast. People are using their cards rather quickly, and they are generating a lot of business from it. I blogged about their 5B breakage today on savvywallet.com. When I buy a song from itunes, I'm not only buying a song, I'm buying the Apple experience, the service and the quality. Everything is the same and the way it works together is well worth the price. Apple rules

[MacHeads]

First i am not equating that PC = Piracy in general nor that ITMS for PC is a bad idea ; But in most countries outside of the USA there is a Very heavy trend toward piracy that goes for software as well as a content , otherwise ITMS's numbers would be in the 50 billion songs not a mere 5 billion. I totally support your right to use ITMS on a PC and perfectly understand that many Ipods are not used on a mac at all nowadays ,though at some point it makes better sense IMHO to go mac than PC. Ipods have a halo effect and are encouraging people to get macs .

I have been using macs for over 20 years now (gosh am i getting old), my first Ipod came with a firewire connector and at the time it came out i bought some AAPL shares because i saw it was going to change the whole music game. And yes had my share of worries on some machines. The switch to intel was indeed a progress though it was chaotic regarding the PPC architecture.

That point aside there are indeed tools to illegally download music on the mac but i would dare say the mass of content pirated downloaded onto macs don't even begin to compare with what is present on PC's hard drives. I have friends working in many IT shops in Europe and they are fighting against constant download policy violations on their PC side of things where as the same thing on their Os X side of the business is at best a rare occurrence and far below the market share difference.

The last part of your post still puzzles me what is a "new Classic" ???? The old one was discontinued in 1992 ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Classic that one did not sport a firmware for sure but a simple ROM .. to get a firmware you had to get a PPC architecture at least http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware.

You must have meant the ipod Classic , i went for the the Ipod touch by the time and i use a server to get my playlists to sync since the Ipod went to USB only i decided to do without the hard drive function and go for touch interface devices.

[Paulhatesitunes]

just downloaded iTunes 7 - it stripped 50% of my album art and album names from any albums I created from my old vynal albums! took me ages to get all this stuff in and within 3 seconds the new version deleted all my work! You dont even get album art for albums you have bought in iTunes in some cases! DONT down load iTunes 7 untill they fixed this bug.