Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

iTunes Sells Three Billion Tracks

by Tim Stevens on August 2, 2007 at 11:01 AM

iTunes Sells 3 Billion

Earlier this week, Apple announced that iTunes, its uber-online music store, has sold its three billionth tune. 3,000,000,000 songs is roughly 75 million hours of audio, or enough music for you to listen to for the next, oh, 8,555 years straight.

In other words, a whole lotta music.

What makes this all the more impressive is that the first billion downloads took a few years. The second billion flew by in eleven months. This third, meanwhile, took only seven months. At this rate, Apple should hit its four billionth track before next spring, its fifth by early summer, and have its world domination plans well underway before 2009.

Of course, that's assuming the iTunes store can stay on top, which could be a challenge given some recent dissention in the ranks amongst the record labels, which believe iTunes holds too much power over them. And, that's also assuming pay-per-track music downloading is a sustainable business model. Taken together, broadband proliferation, device interoperability, mobile Internet and Web 2.0 ingenuity have made the subscription model much more viable and attractive than it once was. It has many sounding the death knell of the pay-per-download model.

From BetaNews

Related Links:

Tags: Apple, iTunes

Comments

2

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular