Apple today announced that one billion songs have been legally downloaded from the iTunes Music Store since it was launched less than three years ago. The billionth song “Speed of Sound” was purchased as part of Coldplay’s X&Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan and as the grand prize winner he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods and a $10,000 gift card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School of Music in his name to commemorate this milestone.
“I hope that every customer, artist and music company executive takes a moment today to reflect on what we’ve achieved together during the past three years,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO in the press release. “Over one billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet.”
With Apple’s legendary ease of use, pioneering features such as integrated video and Podcasting support, iMix playlist sharing, seamless integration with iPod and groundbreaking personal use rights, the iTunes Music Store is the best way for Mac and PC users to legally discover, purchase and download music and videos online. The iTunes Music Store now features a selection of over 3,500 music videos, Pixar and Disney short films, a variety of hit TV shows, 35,000 podcasts, 16,000 audiobooks and more than two million songs from the major music companies and independent record labels.
The iTunes Music Store is also the world’s most popular video download store with more than 15 million videos purchased and downloaded. iTunes offers over 60 popular TV shows for just $1.99 for viewing on a computer or iPod and recently added new hit programming from ABC, Bravo, NBC, MTV Networks and SHOWTIME.
Click here to launch Apple’s iTunes Store.
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Related article:
Apple’s iTunes Music Store hits one billion songs sold milestone – February 23, 2006
Considering it was around midnight in the US, I thought someone from Europe would have been the winner. Doesn’t matter of course, this is great news for iTunes. One billion and too think, Steve Jobs was originally hoping for 1 million the first year.
MW: ABOVE… above expectations…
Congratulations. I tried and tried but obviously to no avail.
wErd!
Wooo congrats Apple! A billion songs is alotta damn songs! First post
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Wow you guys are fast. Not first post.
So he gets 10 5th Gen iPods, guess Steve is unloading inventory before the 28th !
MadMac… you have to be sly and fast…
“Where the heck are all of the singing Cats???!!!” – Paul Newman
(at premiere of CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman)
do you think apple are taking over pc’s from the inside out? quicktime, itunes, will other aps incl front row and then osx be available? who knows, just a thought
Apple stock has gone up to much SELL SELL SELL!
Coldplay is teh SuXXorz. What a waste.
This isn’t exactly a stock discussion, genius.
I think it’s great that Apple has sold 1 billion songs with iTunes. A lot of music fanatics have been converted over to the legal side because of iTunes and the other music services.. a lot of us were P2P users, we really didn’t want to do anything illegal but we had no other way, but now that iTunes has been created downloading music is easier and more fun than it ever was before.
Now, if Apple really wants this to be 100% beneficial for them, they need to be a little bit more cutthroat, no?
Maybe some extra content for the Mac version? Eh?
Although it’s a shame that Coldplay was the billionth song downloaded, I hate Coldplay.
But oh well.
He got an iMac for downloading Coldplay? I suppose it could have been worse, like downloading Michael Jackson……
Lets do some math.
1,000,000,000 songs sold at say 99¢ a song
$990,000,000 dollars
$693,000,000 Labels cut (say 70%)
$99,000,000 Apple cut (servers, bandwith, overhead 10%)
$99,000,000 Credit card companies (10%)
$99,000,000 for the artists
20,000 artists
$5000 per artist
$1000 per artist per year for last 5 years
Costs to artists to live $1500 a month.
Costs for equipment $3000 a month
Coldplay’s “Green Eyes” is cool, anyone who doesn’t like it is a b*tch or a gorrila.
It’s Michiganite, not Michigander.
There is an old joke about “If a man from Michigan is a Michigander is his wife a Michigoose and his children Michigoslings”. There is history about the whole thing, going back to Abe Lincoln. The use of Michigander is common, but not proper.
Go Blue!
http://alumni.umich.edu/info/um/famous_alumni.php
http://www.mgoblue.com/
There are more than 425,000 living UM alumni, among the largest number of living alumni of any American university. Several astronauts are UM alumni, including the crews of Gemini 4 and Apollo 15. The university claims to have the only alumni association with a chapter on the moon, established in 1971 when the all-UM crew of Apollo 15 placed the UM flag on the moon, along with a charter for the UM Alumni Association moon chapter.[31] In addition to former U.S. president Gerald Ford, the university has produced twenty-five Rhodes scholars and 116 Olympic medalists, as well as seven Nobel Prize winners. UM alumni founded or co-founded such companies as Sun Microsystems, Borders Books, Walgreen’s, H&R Block, Domino’s Pizza, and Google. Notable writers who attended UM include playwright Arthur Miller, screenwriter Judith Guest, and authors Charles Major and Sandra Steingraber. In Hollywood, famous alumni include actor James Earl Jones, actresses Lucy Liu and Ruth Hussey, and filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan. Other UM graduates include TV journalist Mike Wallace, former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski, Super Bowl MVPs Tom Brady and Desmond Howard, Pulitzer Prize winning poet John Ciardi, assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, and the architect Charles Moore.
Tony Fadell, (BSE CompE 1991) “father” of the Apple iPod. Created all five generations of the company’s iPod digital music device and the Apple iSight camera.
The Leaders & The Best
U of Michigan
I wonder if he is allowed to put his gift card on eBay? Seriously. I would not want a $10000 gift card to iTunes. I’d rather have the cash to purchase CD’s. Or some more hardware.
Why is it that they companies do “questionable” reporting on the “Virus that will wipe out macs” last week but when iTunes sells over a billion songs I cannot find the story on the front pages of MSNBC, CNN, or Yahoo News? Heck even when Sprint had a million songs downloaded it was on some of the sites. So, where is the media that is too easy on Apple? Anyone? I can’t seem to find it, can you?
Michigander? Oh darn, I thought Michigoose would win. Maybe next time.
Well done Alex you lucky bugger.
And well done Apple. A milliard songs, who’d have thought it?
And a tough bastard in Michigan is known as a Michigranite..
Missed it by THAT much.
“It’s Michiganite, not Michigander.”
I thought a person from Michigan was a
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“The billionth song, ‘Speed of Sound,’ was purchased as part of Coldplay’s X&Y album […]”
Y’know, I’ve wondered about this.
You never see that the song purchased was from Air Supply or Barry Manilow or anybody like that. Or, better yet, Fart noises.
I wonder if there’s some kind of editorial board that sits there and says, “Sorry. There’s just no way we’re going to have ‘Mandy’ as the one billionth song. Who was 1,000,000,001? Coldplay? Okay, that’s better.”
Better yet, how would you like that publicity? “Joe Fella, of East Buttfuque Arkansas, purchased the one billionth song from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. That song was ‘Every Woman in the World’ from Air Supply. Mr. Fella was quoted as saying, ‘I bought it for my girlfriend! Really! It’s not for me! I don’t even like that song!'”
Napster: Because sometimes you don’t want to own your favorite music.
John Seely Brown, formerly Chief Scientist of Xerox, and co-author of “The Social Life of Information”
Edgar F. Codd Ph.D. 1965. A mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases. Dr. Codd’s idea, based on mathematical set theory, was to store data in cross-referenced tables, allowing the information to be presented in multiple permutations. To his frustration, I.B.M. largely ignored his work, as the company was investing heavily at the time in commercializing a different type of database system. I.B.M. was beaten to the market by Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle.In 1981, he received the Turing Award.
Tony Fadell, (BSE CompE 1991) “father” of the Apple iPod. Created all five generations of the company’s iPod digital music device and the Apple iSight camera.
Stephen Forrest. MSc 1974, Ph.D. 1979 , a member of the National Academy of Engineering, former chair of the Princeton Electrical Engineering Department and former director of Princeton’s Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials (POEM) has been named VP of research at the University of Michigan. A Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Optical Society of America; received the IEEE/Laser and Electro-Optics Society Distinguished Lecturer Award in 1996-97. In 1998 he was co-recipient of the Intellectual Property Owners National Distinguished Inventor Award as well as the Thomas Alva Edison Award for innovations in organic LEDs. In 1999, Prof. Forrest received the Materials Research Society Medal for pioneering contributions on organic semiconductor thin films. In 2001, he was awarded the IEEE/LEOS William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award for advances made on photodetectors for optical communications systems. He has authored 371 scholarly papers, and has been awarded 134 patents.
Charles S. Hutchins, (BSE MEAM 1957) Co-founder of Manufacturing Data Systems Inc. Widely recognized as the father of computer-aided manufacturing.
Bill Joy, BSE CompE 1975, D.Eng. hon. 2004, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Dubbed by one publication “…the Edison of the Internet.”. In 1986, Joy was awarded a Grace Murray Hopper Award by the ACM for his work on the UNIX Operating System.
Larry Page, BSE 1995, co-founder of GoogleIn 2002, Page was named a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow. He is a member of the National Advisory Committee (NAC) of the University of Michigan College of Engineering, and together with co-founder Sergey Brin, he was honored with the Marconi Prize in 2004. He is a trustee on the board of the X PRIZE and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.
Claude E. Shannon, (BS EE 1936, BA Math 1936), considered by some to be “father of digital circuit design theory” and “father of information theory”.
Douglas E. Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2
Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype (recently sold to eBay) He has a dual degree in business and computer science from Uppsala University; spent his final year in the US at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.