Apple App Store set to pass iTunes music

It may be a case of one star rising while another sets, but the Apple App Store, the home of all sanctioned iPhone and iPad software, is on a pace to outsell the iTunes music store by March 2011.

The rise of the Apple App Store has been meteoric and well publicized, with each milestone getting acres of tech press. The speed at which those download marks have come has been astonishing. These will culminate this month when the App Store will serve download number 10 billion. For the occasion, Asymco industry analyst Horace Dediu has pulled together the numbers, which show that the App Store is growing at a pace that will have it passing the vaunted iTunes music store sometime in the next few months, probably in March, 2011, according to an AppleInsider article. That is just a bit staggering.

Part of the problem may be that music sales have been flat, seeming to slow down at a time when the smartphone craze is accelerating extremely quickly. And it is not just iTunes, which occupies the pinnacle of on-line music sales, it is the entire music industry. The reason for this flat sales curve is that the paradigm of music sales is changing fast, from the sales of physical sales of CDs to the sales of electronic files. The music industry, with it’s obsession with security, greed, and profits has handled this transition badly, resulting in confusion, bitterness, and piracy in the business.

The same revolution is taking place in the publishing industry, resulting in the demise of journalism as we used to know it. Again, the stubbornness of publishers wanting to cling to the past has resulting in the virtual destruction of journalism as an industry. The music industry, if it cannot find a workable business model, could find itself in exactly the same position. Music as a business has been treading water for  some time now, and could find itself slipping under the waves at any time.

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