100 Million iPods and the Explosive Growth of iTunes

Apple on Monday triumphantly announced it has sold 100 million iPods in five years with a big splashy ad in the New York Times and across the front page of its website. Apple claims the iPod is the “fastest selling music player in history.” That may be so, but it’s not yet the biggest seller: Sony sold 340 million Walkmans (and others sold countless millions of knockoffs).
But Apple watchers are actually more interested in the growth of iTunes. Carl Howe at Blackfriars Marketing notes that iTunes has now sold 2.5 billion songs — 1 billion more songs than 6 months ago. These numbers are only semi-official (Jobs mentioned them casually in an interview), but if Apple is now selling 1 billion songs every six months, that’s a very sharp growth curve.
Also, Howe points out that Apple is also beginning to dominate online sales of movies and TV shows. Wal-Mart revealed on Monday that its online movie store sold just 3,000 movies in the first month. By contrast, Apple sold 125,000 movies in the first week.
“Once you’ve bested the largest American retailer, the sky is the limit,” Howe writes.

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