1,000,000,000 Songs Sold on iTunes Graphed

Somebody took the time to make a graph of the number of songs purchased from iTunes since its launch in May of 2003. It seems like so much longer ago that the iTunes store began stealing money from my wallet, the fact that over a billion songs have been sold in that amount of time is crazy. Crazier still is the fact that 500 million of them were sold in the last seven months. That works out to be 71 million songs a month that people are paying money for — 71 million songs is a lot of songs.

There are still people who complain about Apple’s DRM (digital rights management) but I don’t think the average person really cares when you look at the numbers. The people that do care likely wouldn’t pay for music even if was sold DRM-free like a Yahoo executive just dared to suggest.

I remember the day the first iPod was announced and almost immediately people were saying it would never sell and be another Apple failure. The iTunes store followed and again people really didn’t think it was going to work even though I was online within minutes of updating iTunes so that I could buy something.