iTunes Store
Chart of the day: Apple's 2nd-fastest growing revenue stream
April 29, 2013: 9:02 AM ETTen years later, it's the sprawling digital mall known as the Apple iTunes Store.
Source: Asymco
FORTUNE -- Asymco's Horace Dediu contributed to the bouquet of articles celebrating the iTunes Store's 10th anniversary with a story for Billboard magazine and the bar chart above, posted with a score of eye-popping data points in Happy Birthday iTunes Store.
What struck me, looking at Apple's most recent SEC Form 10-Q, is that revenue from the iTunes Store grew faster sequentially (30%) and year over year (26%) than every other line of Apple's business except the iPad (40% and 29%, respectively).
Maybe that's one of the reasons Tim Cook talked almost as much about Apple's new services during last week's earnings call as he did about the company's hardware products.
For more of Dediu's analysis of the newly redefined iTunes store, see Counting leg stools, Bigger than U.S. Steel and So long, break even.
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Apple's Back to School promo: No more free iPod touch
Instead, students this year get the usual 10% discount and a $100 software gift card
We always thought of the iPod touch that Apple (AAPL) offered students as part of the company's annual "Back to School" sale as the equivalent of a narcotics dealer's free sample: a gateway drug that left users craving for an iPhone.
To the dismay of much of the class of 2011, Apple has dropped the popular loss MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jun 16, 2011 9:31 AM ETPosted in: Apple, Back-to-School, iPhone, iPod, iPod touch, iTunes Store, iWork, Mac, Mac App Store, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, PCs -
Apple offers music pirates permanent amnesty for $24.99
Steve Jobs' master plan to draw a generation raised on stolen music into the iTunes store
Of the 5,364 items in my iTunes music library, 143 are songs I purchased on Apple's (AAPL) iTunes store. The vast majority were ripped from my old CD collection. A few were obtained by other means.
My children have even larger digital music collections that they store on iTunes and play on their Apple devices. I MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jun 7, 2011 7:16 AM ETPosted in: Digital Rights Management, iCloud, iTunes, iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match, iTunes Store, Microsoft, Music, Music library, Steve Jobs, Windows 7, WWDC -
Surprise: 50% of iPad subscribers click "Allow"
Perhaps Apple's magazine subscription rules weren't as one-sided as publishers feared
If you were subscribing to the online edition of, say, Wired, Vanity Fair or the New Yorker on the iTunes store, and you were faced with the pop-up window at right, would you opt-in and click "Allow"?
Most major magazine publishers, when shown this screen by Apple (AAPL) representatives, blanched. Each of them knew full well the kind of gravy they MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 12, 2011 6:49 AM ETPosted in: Apple, Conde Nast, Forbes, Hearst, iPad, iTunes, iTunes Store, New Yorker, Subscription business model, Tablets, Time, Time Inc. -
iPad mags: Another publisher blinks
Bloomberg Businessweek joins Maxim, Elle and Popular Science on the iTunes Store
The iTunes magazine subscription list grew by 33% Monday when Bloomberg L.P. agreed to Steve Jobs' terms and began offering subscriptions to the iPad version of Bloomberg Businessweek on the iTunes store.
That makes four magazine publishers willing to give Cupertino 30% of each subscription sold and take the risk that they will never know who bought it.
In return, the MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Apr 11, 2011 7:35 AM ETPosted in: Apple, Bloomberg Businessweek, Conde Nast, Elle, Hearst, iPad, iTunes Store, Popular Science, Steve Jobs, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc. -
What's 12 petabytes to Apple?
The massive "digital locker" the company is said to have ordered may not really be that big
A broken embargo by IBM (IBM) and a preliminary report in a relatively obscure online journal triggered a couple dozen headlines Wednesday, most of which expressed shock and awe that Apple (AAPL) might have ordered as much as 12 petabytes of digital storage to host video content on its iTunes store.
According to Storage Newsletter, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Apr 7, 2011 7:00 AM ET -
App Store hits 10 billion - updated
It does in 31 months what it took the iTunes Music Store nearly 10 years to achieve
The nines on the app download odometer Apple (AAPL) posted on its website last week rolled over early Saturday, indicating that 10 billion apps have been downloaded since the store opened for business July 10, 2008.
Somebody -- we don't yet know who -- just won a nontransferable $10,000 App Store gift certificate, which if MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jan 22, 2011 12:05 PM ET -
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote
This week a software developer recounted a personal phone call from Steve Jobs to help fix his rejected app. But Derek Sivers recalls the CEO in 2003 as slightly less personable over issues with the iTunes Music store.
By Derek Sivers, contributor
In May 2003, Apple (AAPL) invited me to their headquarters to discuss getting CD Baby's catalog into the iTunes Music Store.
iTunes had just launched two weeks before, with only some music MORE
Nov 12, 2010 1:10 PM ETPosted in: Apple, CD Baby, Derek Siver, eMusic, iTunes, iTunes Store, Rhapsody, Steve Jobs, Yahoo Music -
What makes Apple so sticky
There's more to customer loyalty than the love of a brand
"Stickyness" is a term of art usually applied to websites like Facebook that keep visitors coming back for more.
But it can also be applied to a software platform, and in a note to clients issued Friday Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore takes a crack at measuring the stickiness of the iPhone-iPod-iPad platform.
What he's done is analyze the size of the iPhone, MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 29, 2010 3:55 PM ET -
Apple iTunes: 10 billion songs later
Seven years after Apple began selling music a la carte, what have listeners bought?
The odometer that has been counting song downloads on Apple's (AAPL) iTunes Store for the past week and a half hit the 10 billion mark shortly before 5 p.m. Wednesday Feb. 24 -- a day that happens to be, coincidentally, Steve Jobs' 55th birthday.
To celebrate what it is billing as "one huge milestone for music," the company MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 24, 2010 10:16 AM ET
