How many iTunes songs have *you* bought?


Sometime during the first quarter of 2006 Apple sold its 50 millionth iPod.  Right around the same time, Apple celebrated selling its 1 *billionth* song on iTunes.  A phenomenal achievement.  Or was it?  Dividing the the billion songs by the 50 million iPods yields a grand total of an average of 20 songs sold by Apple per iPod.  So after spending $200 or $300 or even more on a luxury music player, the average person is only spending $20 to put iTunes music on it.

I've had an iPod for a couple of years now. I have probably about 5,000 songs on it.  I have always considered myself atypical in that I had purchased just a handful of songs from iTunes.  A quick check shows that I have purchased only 51 songs from iTunes, less than two per month.  However, this means that I purchase iTunes songs  2.5 times the rate of the average iPod owner.  So instead of being a rare iTunes shopper, I'm a frequent buyer! 

One has to wonder if Apple is making any money from those billion songs.   If the typical iPod user is just buying one iTunes song per month, the credit card transaction fees have to be eating up any potential profits.

Now, if Apple decided to offer an all-you-can-eat plan like Napster or Yahoo, I'm guessing that they'd be able to convert a non-insignificant fraction of their 50 million iPod owners to $10 per month subscribers.  At the same time, the Napsters, Yahoos and Rhapsodies are hoping that the DRM flap that Apple is facing in Europe will end with Apple being forced to open up their DRM, if  that happens, Apple may be forced to compete and will finally offer up their own subscription service.

Posted on: Jun 21, 2006

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

It's amazing how flawed your logic is. I seriously hope Sun does not use similar statistics to roll out and sell it's own products..., although that would explain a lot. -P

Posted by PDid on June 21, 2006 at 09:19 PM EDT #

I've purchased 273 tracks - 22 complete CDs/EPs, and a bunch of individual songs. I bought my first track (Kitaro's Space II) on March 21, 2004, and my most recent album (the Legendary Pink Dots' Your Children Placate You From Premature Graves) today. Do I win a prize?

Posted by Geoff Arnold on June 21, 2006 at 10:25 PM EDT #

You write, " If the typical iPod user is just buying one iTunes song per month, the credit card transaction fees have to be eating up any potential profits." And of course they're not. An iPod user is much more likely to buy one 12-track CD every year than one track each month. Even when they buy individual tracks, the purchases tend to be clustered. And of course Apple combines individual purchases wherever possible before charging your credit card.

Posted by Geoff Arnold on June 21, 2006 at 10:36 PM EDT #

Geoff: Nice to hear from you! Indeed, there are all sorts of usage pattern variables here. My usage pattern has been different than yours, where I'll hear a song on the radio or see it well placed on last.fm and decide to listen to the song a few times, so I am in the once-song-a-month camp.

Posted by Paul on June 22, 2006 at 05:49 AM EDT #

I am not an iPod owner but I am an avid iTunes user. To muddy the waters even further, I have ~2500 audio tracks in my collection, none of them from the iTunes Music Store, but I do have four or five episodes of Lost that I missed during the week and had to purchase from iTunes. (This was before ABC was giving them away for free).

Posted by Zac Johnson on June 22, 2006 at 01:08 PM EDT #

PDid, What about the logic is flawed? The fact that Paul reported an average consumption rate, and implicitly presumes that most people are Gaussian centered around the mean? Of course we all know that behavior like this is not Gaussian, but follows more of a Zipf curve. But so what? The average still holds true. If one person buys 273 tracks, that means that there will be a fair number of other people that only bought 2-3 tracks. As for myself, I own an iPod, but have never bought a single track. I use it primarily for podcast listening in the car, as the iTunes podcast interface is quite user-friendly. I guess I am one of those pulling the average down.

Posted by Jeremy P on June 22, 2006 at 08:55 PM EDT #

Well, iPods sell worldwide. But iTunes MS is available only in few countries. Many iPod owners simply CAN'T buy songs from iTMS.

Posted by Tomasz on June 23, 2006 at 03:40 AM EDT #

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