Musicadium Blog

This week, the iTunes store is featuring a countdown to 10 Billion songs sold globally. What a phenomonal amount to have sold in the 9 years since it’s release in January 2001 (in the US).

I read an article at Digital Music News that also discusses this - apparently, the largest jump in volume purchased has been in the past 12 months or so, (doubling the previous year’s growth rate) from 6 Billion to 10 Billion. Which is amazing to see and shows a real shift in people’s perception and adoption of legal digital music downloading.

Let’s take a look at the top 10 most-downloaded songs - an interesting list to say the least.  It seems to say two things about the iTunes store:

1. Black Eyed Peas, “I Gotta Feeling”
2. Lady GaGa, “Poker Face”
3. Black Eyed Peas, “Boom Boom Pow”
4. Jason Mraz, “I’m Yours”
5. Coldplay, “Viva la Vida”
6. Lady Gaga & Colby O’Donis, “Just Dance”
7. Flo Rida, “Low feat. T-Pain”
8. Taylor Swift, “Love Story”
9. Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love”
10. Ke$ha, “Tik Tok”

It seems that 1) Major Label marketing dollars are still, for the moment, driving the superstars to the top of the charts, and 2) the market on iTunes seems to be a market of younger people, predominantly with a penchant for dance/hip hop/R&B made very recently.  Expand the list out the the top 25 and you could probably surmise that the only other type of music this market likes is soft rock/ballads ala The Fray.  It seems that this list, by the very nature of how long these tracks have been for sale, could be superceded very quickly by the “hottest new thing.” One wonders, does this reflect the rest of the industry?

One would think that there would have been representation in the list from heritage acts or acts at least more than than 5 years old.  The only act with music released pre-2000 in the top 25 (never mind the top 10) is Journey.  Which is odd, looking at it without the benefit of knowing a little bit of pop culture - the Journey song in question has recently benefited from being covered by the cast of Glee, which firms up the young market discussed earlier.  Obviously, The Beatles aren’t on iTunes, so they were never going to win this race, but I really would have thought Michael Jackson if no-one else would have made this list.  Perhaps the King of Pop has not pervaded Gen Y, even despite amazing amounts of downloads after his death (R.I.P.).

It also shows a dominance of the U.S. Market on the rest of the world’s music market - only 1 artist, Coldplay, being from outside the U.S. territory.  No Australian artists made the cut (not even AC/DC!), one would have to surmise that this would be due to the fact that population-wise, Australian acts don’t quite have the mass audience of the U.S. or other territories - however, by that rationale, even with a Chinese iTunes store, and the largest population in the world, not 1 Chinese artist makes a dent or, it would seem, ever make it.

This week, the iTunes team are giving away $10,000 USD credit on the iTunes store for the person who makes the 10 Billionth download in their store.  It is currently at 9,910,346,099 - So keep an eye on that!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Industry News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.