Apple to give away a $10,000 iTunes gift card
Few services have been as good for Apple as iTunes, and iTunes is about to be very good indeed for the lucky downloader of the 10 billionth song from iTunes, awarding that music fan a $10,000 iTunes gift card.
Ten billion of anything is a number too big to visualize, and that is even harder when the items are virtual. Still, it is an indication of how popular the iTunes service really is. The last celebrated iTunes milestone was the download of the 5 billionth song in June of 2008, according to a DailyTech story. That would mean that iTunes customers have downloaded 5 billion songs from iTunes in about 20 months. Further broken down, that would be 250 million songs a month, over 8 million songs a day, and almost 6,000 songs a minute. Looked at another way (probably the way Apple sees it), that would be about $8 million a day, which is a tidy bit of revenue for almost anyone.
Since its inception in 2003, Apple has become by far the leader in online music sales, outstripping the competition by a sizable margin. The lucky winner of the $10,000 gift card will actually be getting Apple’s revenue (according to the averages) from iTunes from 1 minute and 43 seconds of music sales. It is safe to say that the winner may be hard pressed to spend that $10,000 in a hurry, although they may be popular with friends and relatives for some time to come. Then again, there are people with many more than 10,000 tracks in their collection; maybe the big prize winner will be one of them.
Bill gates was prophetic when he praised Steve Jobs clear back when the iTunes store opened by saying, “Steve Jobs ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things. This time somehow he has applied his talents in getting a better Licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music. This is very strange to me. The music companies own operations offer a service that is truly unfriendly to the user and has been reviewed that way consistently.” Maybe what Apple brings us in not a better mousetrap, but a better way to use the one we already have.
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February 13th, 2010
Is the current ‘count-up’ published? Say 9,999,000,000 and counting? This will be a tip as to when to start the download surge.
February 16th, 2010
Very cool contest