Apple’s iTunes hit a major milestone yesterday – 10 billion downloads sold since the service launched in April of 2003. The company commemorated the achievement by awarding a gift card worth $10,000 to the iTunes user who bought the record-breaking download. The song purchased, by user Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia, was the refreshingly old-school “Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash.
What’s interesting here is the store’s growth rate: The company celebrated passing 5 billion downloads in June 2008. So, while it took five years from inception to reach 5 million downloads, it took only another 20 months to generate the second 5 billion. How long until the next five or 10 billion? The GigaOm blog has a great graphical representation of the store’s growth.
Yet, for all the attention this milestone will receive, it’s important to note that these downloads alone have yet to compensate for still-falling CD sales. That’s why the place to start looking for new momentum is the iTunes App Store. Music apps that carry their own price – either as a one-time sale or for monthly reoccurring fees – and drive additional sales through iTunes, have the potential to add a large chunk of new revenues to the digital pie.
And of course all of this could be rendered moot once iTunes unveils the cloud-based music service its reportedly working on. Could this be the last download milestone Apple announces?
For info on this year’s Music & Money Symposium, presented in association with Loeb & Loeb, visit Billboardevents.com.
