iTunes Music Store Sells Ten Millionth Song -- Apple announced today that after about four months the iTunes Music Store has sold its ten millionth song (in an ironic comment on the state of online music, the song was Avril Lavigne's "Complicated"). It's an impressive number, and although there's no telling what Apple's costs in running the store are, it probably contributed at least $3 million to Apple's bottom line in a quarter of the year. The sales rate seems to have stabilized, as you can see if you look at Apple's published numbers. It took 7 days for Apple to reach 1 million songs sold, 16 days to reach 2 million songs sold, 56 days to make it to 5 million songs, and 133 days to hit 10 million. It's not surprising that Apple wouldn't be able to maintain the initial burst of enthusiasm past the first two weeks, but if you eliminate them from consideration, you can see that days 17 through 56 averaged about 75,000 songs per day sold, and days 57 through 133 saw an average of about 65,000 songs per day sold.

That's not too shabby, considering that the iTunes Music Store is basically limited to Macintosh users who are running Mac OS X, have broadband Internet connections, and an interest in purchasing music online. If market share numbers were to be believed, that's at most 5 percent of the overall market that becomes available when Apple opens the iTunes Music Store to Windows users (expected before the end of the year). Personally, I doubt Apple's current song sales would make up just 5 percent of the combined sales to both Mac and Windows users, but that's because I think market share numbers are about as meaningful as statistics cited in political debates. [ACE]

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/sep/ 08musicstore.html>
<http://www.apple.com/music/store/>