Who knew that AirTran had a good in-flight magazine? Well, they do. Their current issue has interesting iTunes numbers (there is also a good article on Jeff Arnold, who founded WebMD). In particular:
- iTunes has now sold more than 500,000,000 songs (daily rate is ~1.8M), representing about 85% of the global (legal) online music market.
- Current inventory is about 2 million songs, up from 200,000 2 years ago.
- 10 million active accounts–and Apple has a registered credit card for each one.
- Dividing the number of sold songs by the number of active users, it looks like the average account has purchased about 50 songs, which suggests that the service is pretty sticky.
Still, Apple has long said that iTunes contributes little margin to their overall business–the real money is in the iPods.
My wife is an avid iTunes customer. I see the VISA transactions monthly. I personally hope, and wonder, that at some point in 1-2 years, that her initial purchases will diminish - she has been “re-buying” a lot of existing songs she’s always loved. And new songs is much smaller and limiting. So the long-term model of Apple, with my point above in mind, would be to a. convert non-iPod customers to iPod to make money on hardware and “re-buying” of songs they love, and targeted audiences, maybe audiophiles, teens, who will always buy new music.
Me? I love my XM…
Left by Mark Milligan on December 1st, 2005