RTFM

Happy 30th Birthday Apple!
Apple iTunes song downloads to reach 1 BILLION by April 1, 2006.

Using Apple's own PR Library I was able to reconstruct the historical performance of the iTunes music store since it's inception. The following graph depicts the growth curve for iTunes downloads, based on Apples own press releases (and interpolation between dates.)

Today (Jan 10, 2006) Steve Jobs announced that iTunes music downloads had passed the 850 million mark, and that 3 million songs per day were being downloaded from iTunes. After adding this information to the graph, it now looks like Apple will hit the 1 Billion song download mark during the last week of March 2006, a very nice Birthday present for Apple which turns 30 years old on April 1, 2006.

Apple iTunes downloads to reach 1 BILLION by April 2006.

Using Apple's own PR Library I was able to reconstruct the historical performance of the iTunes music store since it's inception. The following graph depicts the growth curve for iTunes downloads, based on Apples own press releases (and interpolation between dates.)

The pinkish-purple portion of the graph is my conservative estimate of the continued growth of the downloads. (As long as the record industry doesn't pull the plug on Apple.) Based on these estimates, Apple should hit the One Billionth (with a 'B') download in late April 2006.

With the record companies collecting 70 cents for each download, they would have to be completely brain dead to turn off a $500,000,000/year spigot.