maddogfog.blogspot.com — Apple recently passed the 1 billion purchased songs milestone on iTunes. Here's a graph showing the major iTunes since they started selling music in May 2003. 500 million songs purchased in the last 7 months!
Feb 26, 2006 View in Crawl 4
donwilsonFeb 27, 2006
The graph is misleading, it should show, from week one, each weeks amount of songs sold, not sold since starting.
shiftlessFeb 27, 2006
I love graphs like these
sedawkFeb 27, 2006
You know, if I said two years ago that someone was going to legally sell 1 Billion songs on the internet within 24 months -- You would say that I was on crack. This is totally cool!
smithchrFeb 27, 2006
Ok. So, this graph bothered me and I decided to make one of my own (no hosting that will sustain a digg-attack, so just take my word for this). Instead of showing *total* downloads on the vertical axis, my graph shows difference in downloads between the previous and current date from the data at the top of the linked site provided by the poster. This new graph still has a serious exponential-type shape, but didn't look quite right. So, using the curve-fitting built into excel, I found that a 5th order polynomial is the lowest order curve that closely follows the data. The equation of this curve is given as "y = 3E-12x^5 - 2E-09x^4 + 6E-07x^3 + 0.0002x^2 + 0.0146x + 1.6345".I just have one comment: when it comes to making graphs, a cumulative total on the dependant axis and time period on the independent axis is just asking for trouble. You could easily fool yourself into believing that your data shows something it just does not. Also, data on a graph of that sort is much harder to analyze as you have to manipulate it in a manner similar to the method I used in order to extrapolate specific information from the data.
johntbFeb 27, 2006
Yes, I know that the derivative of an exponential graph is itself exponential, but I'm curious how close to exponential this trend really is. Obviously, this can't keep going up exponentially forever, and I think that seeing the derivative might be interesting.
wdotFeb 27, 2006
While I don't like DRM and overly lossy songs, I have to respect Apple. They haven't been able to dominate market share with OS's and computers... yet... But in the digital music realm, they've made themselves king.
subcodecFeb 27, 2006
oops...I meant allofmp3.com...my bad
usernametakenFeb 28, 2006
wuleidando said, "time vs. accumulating sales? what's that supposed to tell you?"and then mrmanfidz added "Agreed. The intent of the article is clear and has achieved its purpose, but the execution was shoddy."and I say: STFU. If you knew how to read a graph you could easily tell that sales have been roughly doubling every 30 weeks. That's very close to exponential growth, and impressive to say the least.