News Apple iTunes sells 200m songs online

The Register and MacCentral report that Apple's online music store, iTunes, has sold over 200m songs.

The 200 millionth song was part of "The Complete U2" according to Apple. With online music competition on the rise, Apple has continued to increase its market share and open new online stores around the world. Just recently, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store Canada and the EU store, adding nine new countries.
Currently iTunes sells 4.76m songs per week.

According to The Register:
"In October, Apple forecast it would sell more than 200m songs by the end of the year, so it has clearly met and exceeded that target. And with just over two weeks to go, there's plenty of time for iPod owners - particularly all those who are going to find one under the Chrimble Tree on 25 December - to download around 10m more.

It's also rumored that Apple will be releasing Flash Memory based iPods in the new year.

 

So there are people using iTunes. I'm stunned.

 

Well, it does the job to be fair. Though winamp plugin is about a million times better.

Can't wait for flash based ipods, hopefully they'll put an end to the reliability problesms of the HD based ipods - me and everyone of my friends whose had an ipod has had a failure of some sort, we did get replacements but it is annoying.

To be quite honest , I don't know why sony and the like have bothered trying to copy the ipod because the HD mp3 player will be obsolete within a year. If you can get a 2GB flash player, which you could even have removable media for, who wants an unreliable HD one?!

 

Just to know it... Has Winamp its own platform or does it use a given one (like iTunes, musicload.de) ?

 

Winamp is winamp... It just uses a plugin to interface with the ipod, which appears as a removable hd in explorer. It is a stand alone program.

 

I'm guessing a 40GB Flash player would be prohibitively expensive?

 

How come you think THAT ? ^^

A 1 GB flash player is about 100 € at the moment...

 

which makes a 40gig one €4,000 and thats not expensive?

sure its more convenient, but its way too expensive to produce atm .

 

Did I say anything else ?

 

well, ok maybe there's room for one more generation of players over the next 6months, but surveys have shown that most people are quite happy with enough storage for 1000 songs, e.g. the mini ipod, and by that time flash should be cheap enough to compete at that storage level.

The only reason to want more and more storage is that it can be used as a 2nd HD. Admittedly i have used about 10Gb just in music on my ipod, but that's just because I can.

[edit]Anyway my point was that HD units are unreliable and I look forward to the day flash takes over.[/edit]

 

Why is it that so many people have so much scorn for MiniDisc that it's not even being discussed here as a viable alternative? The new Hi-MDs cost around US$10 for a 1 GB disc, the transfer software transparently converts any format that your PC has codecs for into the MD's native ATRAC3 format, and they are extremely reliable. Over the four years I've had my current MD walkman, I've dropped it at least three times from waist-height onto paved surfaces and the only indications of these incidents are a few scratches on the corners of the case -- it still works just as well as it did the first time I pulled it out of the box (which is to say perfectly )

Essentially, the discs are cheaper than any flash cards out there, the units themselves are more sturdier than HD-based players, and the Hi-MDs now offer plug-and-play USB drive functionality. The only thing going against them versus HD-based players is that you can't match storage for physical size. But I maintain that this is offset by the fact that the media is removable, and no matter how fast your PC connection is, you're never going to be able to download as fast as picking a few choice pre-recorded disks off the shelf, which is affordable at $10 per Gig. And this is the launch price, with the discs currently in short supply to boot. When I bought my MD four years ago, discs ran about AU$5 a pop. Just before Hi-MD was announced they were going for just over AU$2. And now they're even cheaper, plus they can be reformatted to triple the storage capacity (From roughly 100MB to around 300MB) in the new Hi-MDs.

I usually carry five or six discs around with me at the moment without getting through them all in one day, and I'm talking about the older, lower capacity discs. I can't see myself needing to carry more than about three discs with me when I switch over to Hi-MD, and that'd only be to increase my choice on the move.

Failing any of that, a good MP3/WMV/ATRAC3-enabled CD walkman kicks the pants off anything else going in terms of both unit and media cost, and are they really that huge? No, they're not. Plus, you can listen to your new CDs the moment you walk out of the store with them instead of waiting until you get home. Some of you guys do buy CDs, right?

Nezuji