SoundGreen

Perhaps most importantly, Apple offers not just the downloading service but also the hardware for managing music collections.

Hmmm... Take 3 Billion songs, yes billion with a B! divide that by 100 million iPods sold over the last 5 years... and you get, are you ready for this... Drum roll please, 30 songs per iPod!!! Wow that is 6 songs per year?!?

WTF... if it was good news it would be worth commenting on! They have over 5M songs, which is less than 20% of what Napster had at its height 7 years ago!!! (Napster had over 25M songs in its database of songs at its height)

You have to wonder what the Big 4 (five at the time) were thinking when they turned down Shawn Fanning (aka Napster himself) and his $1B of money over four years (beginning in 2000)!

It would have been a better split than iTunes and they wouldn't have the vulture that is Steve Jobs! Don't hate me, hate the business! He is a vulture with a good mouse trap. In a few short years he took something that many people did not think twice about, portable storage, and turned it into a killer. Perhaps Steve took a page out of Microsoft's, aka we used to work for you, that is until we rendered you useless to 95% of the world, Bill Gates' book? And don't hate Bill. What has Jobs done with his money lately? Was it anything on the level of trying to eradicate illnesses in Africa that would already be solved if the illness effected white people in the USA?

Back to iTunes... Kudos on 3B songs and the 150MB of space on each 8Gig iPod you have sold. To me this indicates two things:

• Perhaps there is more truth than I thought regarding studies that show people only listen to new music until their mid 20s
  
• CD sales (or past CD sales) are still driving the sales of new technology (i.e. iPods or my favorite from 2 years ago Cowan iAudio X5 20GB with Voice Recorder)... OR people are still copying songs from the internet and borrowing music and copying it for themselves.

Makes me wonder about trying to give away over $1M to artists in two years!!!

• iTunes has given less than $700M in 5 years (and that is using a very conservative $0.25 per song goes to the artist).
• If you use a realistic $0.05 goes to the artist (on average), you calculate that iTunes has paid $150M to artists over 5 years while people other than the creators earned $2.8B!!!

Try to wrap your brain around that one.
And if you get tired of doing that, consider that it is estimated that Napster allowed the swapping/sharing of over 30B songs (10 times what iTunes has done in five years)