iTunes Breaks 6 Billion, DRM is Dead

It’s an annual tradition. Every year at Macworld, Apple (AAPL) releases a smattering of stats that gives a peek at how its business is doing. At this year’s Philnote (Phil Schiller gave the speech instead of Steve Jobs), which was Apple’s last Macworld appearance, the stats were few and far between. A few morsels for the information-starved Apple faithful (and investors). But here they are:

• iTunes has now sold six billion songs (it crossed the 5 billion mark last June).
• Over 10 million different tracks are available on iTunes.
• Starting today, 8 million songs are DRM-free, and all 10 million will be DRM free by the end of March.
• There are now over 75 million accounts on iTunes linked to credit cards.
• In fiscal year 2008, Apple sold 9.7 million Macs
• Mac sales grew twice as fast as the overall PC market.

The last billion songs took about five and half months to sell, which was the same pace more or less that it took Apple to get to its fourth billion (January, 2008) and fifth billion songs (June, 2008). So iTunes sales are no longer accelerating, despite many more iPhones and iPods out there. It makes you wonder what the saturation point is for consumers buying songs from iTunes. One thing to cheer about, DRM is now officially dead (it looks like Apple traded variable pricing for getting rid of DRM), but I’m not sure that is going to spurt sales much.

From my own experience, I buy a few albums when I get a new iPod, and then my purchases taper off. I’ve only purchased 139 songs from iTunes over the past five years. That comes to $28 a year. But then, I’m well past my music-buying prime. How much have you spent on iTunes?

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Comments

[junkyarddog:]

$37 dollars in the past 3 years...

I mostly imported my physical CD's into iTunes (not a whole lot) and I keep buying a few songs here and there. Like you, I'm also past my music buying prime.

Jan 06 03:47 PM

[rbs:]

I've spent enough on iTunes over the last 3-4 years that the new "Upgrade My Library" button is asking for $177.30.

Ouch.

And there's no way to upgrade just a piece, or to tell it to skip those 5 albums that's you're sorry you bought.

Jan 06 03:53 PM

[reinharden:]

I suspect that the "over the air" ability will help accelerate iTunes sales a little bit. Especially when combined with Shazam.

For what it's worth, iTunes says I've purchased 730 items including 584 audio files; however, I've been stupidly fanatic about getting the free songs each week. After 4 years, that's 400+ right there.


Seeing as how I came into iTunes with a few hundred CDs (and eBay and used stores have usually been cheaper than iTunes), I've personally been more interested in ripping music from my CDs than buying new music directly from iTunes.

And since, for the last nearly 2 years, we all knew that iTunes was going to go DRM-free any day now, I've avoided buying any music there.


So, the combination of $.69 back catalogue songs, finally DRM-free music, and over the air purchases for iPhones means that there *might* be some pent up demand...I guess we're find out this quarter.

reinharden

Jan 06 05:32 PM

[RK:]

One can spend itunes bucks on songs, movies, applications via app store. On top of that, I usually give itunes gift cards to teenagers. They always like the cards. I probably spent over $500 last year on itunes. Itunes is a good media distribution mechanism.

Jan 06 09:31 PM

[mollytjm:]

i've spent more at the apps store lately, buying games and other apps, including a radio app so i could listen to free music and news. i've downloaded audiobooks to my ipod though, 5 last year. But since getting my iPhone, i'd loaded 20 books to read on it...after discovering that it was very comfortable to read on the small screen.
but i gave iTunes gift cards to all the kids i know and they were thrilled and immediately downloaded music...so it could just be an age thing. i'm no longer a kid...i'm retired:))

Jan 07 11:55 AM