Cool point except that Apple has now sold over 430 million songs from the iTMS and is on pace for over 500 million per year (so it’s speeding up fast!).

And who really buys all of their own music again instead of ripping what they already have?

New iPod owners aren’t new to music—they are just new to iPods. (You also have to factor in the people that have mutliple iPods—upgrades and what not.)

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I buy cds.  I hate DRM.

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She needs to factor in podcast downloads as well. Its so easy to fill an iPod with podcasts its not even funny..and in fact its quite sad really. Gotta do something about that! Need more room for music

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I suspect in the last year iTunes has grown faster than the number of iPods, and as the comments point out the iPods are also being bought as replacements.

Hum. Let’s assume the average iPod out there holds, say, two to three thousand songs. That’s, roughly speaking, about three hundred CDs worth. It’s not outside the realm of probablility that someone could fill that by ripping their CD collection, but in the vast number of cases it’s not likely. Don’t need to go out on a limb, just get the back of the envelope out again…

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I’d have to disagree with Downhill Battle’s “21 iTunes per iPod” estimate. The true figure can be either gross underestimate or overestimate, depending on where you live.

Don’t forget that the iTunes are only available to Internet users in select few countries. Form their website:

“Purchases from the iTunes Music Store are available only in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.”

That means iPod users in these countries are responsible for nearly all of the 60 mil songs sold, which also means they probably have more than 21 songs on each of their iPods.

On the other hand, iPods are sold worldwide, so that also means there are many millions of users who DO NOT HAVE A SINGLE ITUNES SONG on their iPods - simply because they are not allowed to buy from the iTunes Music Store!

Regards,
Chan Lee Meng
Malaysia (where we don’t get iTunes)

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There’s another assumption made in the article (apart from the idea that nobody owns CDs) that every iPod is completely filled.  I know mine isn’t.

Even so, my (combined with my wife’s) personal collection contains 110 songs bought from iTunes and 5137 songs from our combined CD collection.  That’s about 2%.  If the average collection in iTunes store countries was about 1000 songs, then 21 bought songs would be just about right!

Do *you* know how large the average iTunes collection is?  Didn’t think so.

Grrr.  Go learn statistics.

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I’ve had an iPod (20g) for about 18 months now.

2 gigs is music I’ve ripped from CDs I’ve purchased. About 100 mb is free mp3s from various places (Amazon’s free downloads and a brief subscription to emusic).

I’ve never bought music from iTunes, though I use it for ripping and organizing.

The rest of my iPod storage space? I use it as a portable drive between my office and home. There are about 6 gigs of backup data. I also have a Belkin photo thingy that will drag photos off of my media cards while I’m traveling. At the moment there are about 8 gigs of photos on there. By far I use my iPod as a portable storage device that happily plays music.

If you want to to a truly representative study of what people are doing with their iPods, I’m willing to participate in a survey.

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You can’t be serious when you say that you don’t think the data has changed all that much in a year

The data is about users and products with a lifespan of a 3 years before the next complete upgrade…how can calculations based on one year old data/assumptions be at ALL relevant?

The data could be off by a small factor of 10 with that kind of time lag.

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