So the iTunes Store just sold its three one-billionth song . Wow . That ’s a mess of anything , regardless of what you ’re counting . ( OK , if you ’re counting grain of sand on the coastline of the United states , perhaps it ’s not a lot . ) But more interesting to me is the stride at which Apple hit its latest billion - song threshold . It accept the company a little less than three year to sellthe first billioniTunes downloads . Then it took less than a year to sellthe second billion . Now , just over six months subsequently , the entrepot has passed the three - billion song stigma .
expect at it as precisely as potential , if we assume that the two and three billion Sung targets were hit the same daylight as the press acquittance went out ( January 9 , 2007 , and July 31 , 2007 , respectively ) , that think it lead 203 twenty-four hour period to sell one billion birdsong . That mean the Store had to average about 4,926,108 song purchases per twenty-four hours , or 205,255 per 60 minutes . Breaking it down even further , that ’s 3,421 songs sell per minute , or an dumbfounding 57 songs soldevery secondfor those 203 mean solar day !
If each song is an average of 5 MB , then the Store ’s bandwidth usage — just for vocal , not counting moving picture , TV show , games , podcasts , or any other non - song - refer Store item — is a staggering 1,002 GB per time of day . That ’s about aterabyteof data transfer per hour , every time of day , for those 203 days . Think about paying that bill from your ISP!“Yes , I ’d like to make out the price of your 720 TB per calendar month data transfer plan , please . ”
Clearly the rate of sales ca n’t continue to reduplicate every time the next billion Song dynasty marking is reach , but Tuesday ’ announcement makes it clear that the iTunes Store has n’t yet make a point where the growth rate is slowing . It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the next billion ; the quickening curve on the first three would point to something like three months from now , but that seems almost too dissolute to me . What do you retrieve ? Where is the iTunes Store on the unit sale curve ? Will things continue to speed up , or is six months as quickly as we ’ll see a billion strain sold ?
