James Delahunty
27 Feb 2006 7:35
Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes music store reached a major milestone a few days ago when a teenager in the US unknowingly bought the billionth track sold from the site. Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said the billionth download represented "a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet". The teenager, Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield in Michigan won a lot of goodies from Apple for buying Coldplay: Speed of Sound.
The 16 year old won a 20-inch Mac computer, 10 iPods and a US$10,000 gift certificate for iTunes. Apple will also establish a scholarship in his name to New York's Juilliard School of Music. Hate or love Apple, you have to give credit for the figure of downloads. You cannot compare legal downloads to file sharing, considering each track from iTunes sold worldwide cost about 99c, and file sharing is free and generally easier to use.
While this is good news for the music industry, it also did take a chunk out of CD sales, according to official data. 618.9 million albums were sold in 2005, down from 762.8 million in 2001, a drop which the music industry blames almost completely on file sharing. Now about 14% of Internet users have used iTunes, with teenagers being the biggest visitors to the service and most likely to purchase tracks.
Source:
BBC News