iTunes store: 5 billion songs; 50,000 movies per day
Apple issued two nice round numbers on Thursday.
First, it announced that the number of songs purchased and downloaded from the iTunes store since it opened on April 28, 2003 has passed the 5 billion mark. This represents a continued acceleration of music sales. It took Apple (AAPL) nearly three years to sell its first billion songs (Feb 23, 2006), ten months to sell its second billion (Jan. 6, 2007), seven months to sell its third (July 31, 2007) five and a half to sell its fourth (Jan. 15, 2008), and five months to sell its fifth (June 19, 2008).
It’s harder to put Apple’s second announcement — that movies are now being purchased or rented from the iTunes store at the rate of more than 50,000 a day — in perspective. Apple has been selling videos since 2005, but at first those were strictly music videos and TV shows. Movies came later, mostly from Disney. By April 2007, Apple was able to announce that it had sold more than 2 million movies. Movie rentals didn’t start until January of this year, when Hollywood finally opened its film vaults, but it’s probably fair to assume that rentals represent the larger part of the more than 50,000 titles being downloaded every day. At that rate, Apple is selling or renting 1.5 million movies a month and should have another nice round number for us by Macworld 2009.
Apple now claims that the iTunes store is the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S. and the world’s most popular online movie store.
The company has never revealed how much money it makes on each song or video it delivers; it claims to run the iTunes store at “just above break even.” Independent estimates put its profit margin on music sales at 10% to 30% percent.
One way to put Apple’s remarkable growth in perspective, is that the iTunes store is becoming roughly (as in order of magnitude) as big in revenues and profits as all of Apple before the iPod.
And a mere 10% on $3B in revenues is hardly breakeven any more.
P.S…. LOL at PED’s new fanboy/stock pumper status. haha.
Four billion was actually announced in mid-January, 2008 at MacWorld Expo by Steve Jobs. Not in late February.
Considering that Apple didn’t fully stock rentals until the last 2 months, one could expect that daily movie figure to increase. Perhaps that how we’ll be able to see the impact of rentals when Apple releases the next set of figures, say around MacWorld.
Posted By Len Philadelphia, PA : Once again this site twists the headlines in an attempt to pump AAPL stock…last time they omitted a zero in front of .9 so it appeared as 9% increase in sales instead of 0.9% now it appears AAPL sells 5 billion songs a day.
Burning question is why does this poor journalism considered finacial new on Yahoo?
ex ped: Attempting to pump AAPL stock is not something I am often accused of.
PED runs at the rate of 1 positive apple story for each 5 negatives. If you feel he is pumping AAPL, what does that really tell you about the stock?
For Len in Philly:
Come on, there’s a semicolon between the 2 ideas in the headline.
And do you really mean to say that people will run out and buy Apple stock because they simply see a headline that seemingly implies that Apple is selling 5 billion songs A DAY?? Investors who are so dumb as to buy on the basis of one semicolon-based headline deserve to get taken. They could do a lot worse than buying Apple, too.
P.S. No, I don’t own any Apple stock.
Nobody in their right [freakin] mind would read the headline as “50 billion songs a day”. Give us all a break.
MacFanBoy (and proud of it) but not a share holder for a very long time.
RE: Fourth billion. Shouldn’t that be “Feb. 27, 2008″?
ex ped: Fixed. Thanks all.
I think you mean Feb 27, 2008 for 4 billion in sales, not 2007. Otherwise, very informative.
check the date on the fourth billion, I think it should be 2008 instead of 2007.
Once again this site twists the headlines in an attempt to pump AAPL stock…last time they omitted a zero in front of .9 so it appeared as 9% increase in sales instead of 0.9% now it appears AAPL sells 5 billion songs a day.
Burning question is why does this poor journalism considered finacial new on Yahoo?
ex ped: Attempting to pump AAPL stock is not something I am often accused of.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
please, someone tell those itunes shoppers about the bittorent