News

iTunes Billion Song Countdown Contest Finished! [UPDATE]

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 12:20 AM - by

Apple's Billion Song Countdown contest is nearing an end (as noted by our friends at MacNN). Launched earlier in February of 2006, the contest will reward the customer who buys the one billionth song from the iTunes Music Store with a 20" iMac, 10 (ten) 60GB iPods, and a US$10,000 gift certificate to the iTMS. As of this writing, the song counter is at more than 999,000,000 songs, and rising rapidly.

Update: At Approximately 12:38 AM EST, the contest counter flipped from 999,995,000 songs sold to showing the 1 billionth marker as having been reached. The winner has not yet been announced, and we expect Apple to do so sometime on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006.- Editor]


Almost a billion songs, and rising rapidly!

Screen shot from iTunes showing 1 Billion Songs

5 comments from the community.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 23, 2006 2:16 am

Tough to argue with success.

Will the last remaining Apple/iTunes naysayer please turn off the lights on their way out?

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LaurieF said:

member since 15 Jun 2001 with 3547 posts, TMO Forum Mod, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Feb 23, 2006 6:51 am

That's 1 song for every 6.5 people in the world. Well, almost. Or it will be by the time you read this.

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 23, 2006 10:22 am

LaurieF wrote:
That's 1 song for every 6.5 people in the world. Well, almost. Or it will be by the time you read this.

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

I am afraid that the population is rising faster than the number iTunes sold

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Feb 23, 2006 12:39 pm

FYI:

The counter on the countdown page is an inaccurate display. I've tested this out by opening the countdown and then opening another some odd minutes later and the compared two would show the counter on different numbers counting. The difference was quite large. I'd assume you'd have to constantly refresh the page for it to display the closest accurate number.

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LaurieF said:

member since 15 Jun 2001 with 3547 posts, TMO Forum Mod, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Feb 23, 2006 5:36 pm

Anonymous wrote:
LaurieF wrote:
That's 1 song for every 6.5 people in the world. Well, almost. Or it will be by the time you read this.

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

I am afraid that the population is rising faster than the number iTunes sold

That's incorrect, I have to say. Five years ago the number of iTunes songs sold was zero. Now it is 1e9. Five years ago the world's population was non-zero.

The rate of increase is faster for iTunes songs than people. Let's assume, for argument's sake, that there are 333 million songs sold a year. That's three years/billion. At that rate in roughly nineteen years there will be 6.5e9 songs sold. The world's population will have increased of course, Zeno's arrow notwithstanding, but nowhere at the same rate.

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