It's Rishi

PRN (Paul, Rishi, Nick) just launched a new Facebook app called My Apple Life. It allows users to share the Apple products that they have and want on their Facebook profile. Also, users can find others that have the same products that they do and engage in discussions like “What’s the best waterproof case for my iPod Nano?” Check it out…

The Steve Jobs Keynote this morning left most, including many Apple die-hards, wanting a bit more to talk about. The item that caught my attention the most was Steve’s announcement that Apple had sold its 1 billionth song on iTunes. Pretty amazing.

I dug up some fun facts about iTunes:

• “The billionth song Speed of Sound was purchased as part of Coldplay’s X&Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. As the grand prize winner he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods (5 white/5 black) and a $10,000 gift card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School of Music in his name to commemorate this milestone.” Lucky bastard! (Wikipedia)
• 42 million iPod products have been sold. That’s approximately 25 iTunes downloads per iPod sold.
• At last measure, approximately over 3 million songs sold per day or over 2 thousand songs sold per minute!(Pocket-lint.co.uk)
• In it’s first year, Jobs predicted iTunes would sell 100 million songs. iTunes fell short selling 70 million songs.
• iTunes has 83% of the $1.1 billion online digital music market (Red Herring article)
• It’s estimated that Apple’s profit margin on each song is in the low single digits, or in other words, a few pennies per song sold. Assuming 5%, 1 billion * .05 = $50 million profit since iTunes launch
• Only iPods are compatible with Apple’s DRM. Why? The purpose of iTunes is to sell iPods, not to sell music. The fact that Apple is able to turn a profit on iTunes is all gravy. However, while it’s not really an apples-apples comparison, one could say that the purpose of MacOS is/was to sell Mac hardware….that didn’t work out to well in the long-term.