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September Music Event: Just the numbers

Sep 1, ’10 8:31 PM
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  • 300 Apple Stores
  • 10 countries with Apple Stores
  • >1 million store visitors some days
  • 80k 1:1 sessions/week
  • 120 million iOS devices sold to date
  • 230k new iOS activations per day
  • 6.5 Billion apps downloaded
  • 200 apps downloaded every second
  • 250k apps available on App Store
  • 25k iPad apps available on App Store
  • 275 million iPods sold
  • #1 portable game player: iPod touch
  • 50%+ of portable game device share US and world-wide
  • 1.5 billion game and entertainment titles downloaded to iPod touch
  • 11.7 billion songs downloaded from iTunes
  • 450 million TV episodes downloaded from iTunes
  • 100 million movies downloaded from iTunes
  • 35 million books downloaded from iTunes
  • 160 million iTunes accounts
  • 23 countries for iTunes music downloads
  • 12 million song library
  • Priit

    300 Apple Stores prove that deep inside Apple is just a local redneck business :-) There's an Apple Store somwehere in Nebraska. Zero in Berlin…

    • http://www.asymco.com asymco

      There are 3004 Lidl stores in Germany and none in Nebraska.

      • Priit

        Well, look at apple.fi home page today. How many finnish words do you see there? Have you seen such arrogance elsewhere – have an Apple Online Store, local site and just literally pee on that local language, having 50 billion in the bank ? How do you feel? Do Apple cares about you, loves you? So what about Lidl, is there all in german in the Finnish shops?

        Then back to the stores – how many % of Apple revenue comes from US, how many % of stores are on US soil? I don't see any reason to bragg here – if those stores are good business, then it's negligence to not have them abroad and somebody should be fired. If those stores are bad business (so much stores and so low % of income created globally) then again, why bragg?

      • http://www.asymco.com asymco

        My point is only that retail is a tough business to distribute globally. Even the best, most prolific retailers have trouble breaking into certain markets (lidl is an example, as is walmart).

    • Ian Davies

      I think it's fair to say that if Apple saw profit to be had from a retail presence in Finland then they would gladly take it. They may well have ambitions across the wider Scandinavian region, but I think you have to remember that the reason they have been successful is because they have been careful and done things their own way. If they come to Finland it will be under the same conditions and criteria that drive them to open a store anywhere.

      As for your perceived slight against the Finnish language on Apple's local site, I can see plenty of native words on the home page. Yes, there are a lot of English ones too, but they are pretty much all related to the new announcements yesterday. It's possible that they just haven't been localised yet. I clicked through to a page one level down and it was all native, so I think you're being belligerent, at best.

      I'm British and I still haven't got over having my Wastebasket replaced by the Trash ;)

      • Priit

        But, please click Store on Finnish page…. click some links there. See. I wonder why Apple's attention to the detail is totally lost there?

      • Priit

        Well, as you can see http://www.betalogue.com/2010/09/10/applestore-ca… , Apple just don't f..ng care even about French speaking canadians. It is so hard to translate the basic shopping cart terms from English to French. Somebody here to donate a few bucks to Apple to hire a decent translator? :-)

  • Tom

    If apple's neck is red, it's cause of the sunburn they got from all that hard work makin stuff to sell in those 300 stores. Hhmmmm….problem?

  • Tom Ross

    There's probably no store in Berlin yet because Berlin is not one of the richest cities of Germany (both Hamburg and Munich have bigger GDPs inspite of smaller populations), because Berlin already has the Gravis flagship store (http://www.ifoapplestore.com/db/2007/01/31/berlin-resellers-giant-store/) and mostly because Apple will wait for the right property in the right location, even if it takes a few years longer. Also, Apple is Anglocentric.

  • Tom Ross

    The comparison to Nintendo DS and Sony PSP is somewhat peculiar. It's true that Sony and Nintendo shipped only 4.35 million handheld consoles last quarter, so that's probably less than the amount of iPod Touches Apple shipped. However, last quarter was an untypically slow one for Nintendo, before a big product launch. They're still aiming for 30 million units this year. Sony for 8 million units. I don't see Apple selling more than 38 million iPod Touches this year, especially since they've just raised the price by $30.

    • http://www.asymco.com asymco

      No disagreement from me. The numbers were probably a single quarter event. Jobs also said iPhone out-sold RIM one particular quarter but that has not happened since.

  • Tom Ross

    I used to take notes of Apple's video milestones back when they were still publishing them. Here are some:

    2006-11-01: 1 million videos sold per week.

    2007-01-09: 50 million TV episodes, 1.3 million movies sold.

    2007-04-11: 2 million movies sold.

    2007-09-05: 100 million TV episodes sold.

    2008-04-02: 125 million TV episodes sold.

    2008-05-13: 150 million TV episodes sold.

    2008-06-19: 50,000 movies sold or rented per day.

    2008-10-16: 200 million TV episodes sold (1 million HD).

    2009-03-19: 250 million TV episodes sold. 33 million movies sold or rented.

    2010-09-01: 450 million TV episodes sold. 100 million movies downloaded.

    Going by this, TV shows have stayed mostly flat for the last several years, at around 10 million downloads per month. Movies have grown to about 5 million downloads per month.

    • Arjun

      Is that why there's a push to move towards rentals? Purchases reached their limit.

      How many can you buy at that price and how much can users store (stuff you bought, you don't throw away usually)?

    • http://www.asymco.com asymco

      Thanks for the data. I love the purchase model but clearly it's not a common use case. However I would not say there is a limit reached. The problem is distribution. The way Jobs put it, the subsidized cable box model prevents much innovation in the TV industry. I don't see that changing much even with the new Apple TV.

    • ChuckO

      I think this is a reset of the non-music iTunes media model. I suspect that they are doing the usual Apple one step at a time approach to moving this to the cloud.

      1. Start with renting TV and Movies from the cloud

      2. See how that goes

      3. Start selling TV and Movies to be accessed from the cloud.

      4. At some point get music in the cloud same as TVMovies.

      Apple's at the mercy of the content providers and they aren't very interested in helping Apple.

      I don't understand why Apple doesn't take out the checkbook to loosen this up. I recently read Cable TV pays the studios $250 million a year to carry their content. I can't see how it wouldn't be the best money Apple ever spent to match that.

      The only thing I can think is there are potential technical issues similar to the load of iPhones on the AT&T network that could pop up if they went to fast.

  • Yowsers

    @priit — I wouldn't read too much into it. If I had to guess, I would think they're navigating a large number of tricky issues.

    Retail is not easy, especially if you're a computer devices company whose core competency is not retail.

    MSFT, Dell and Sony have stepped into the retail space and floundered. Many of us snicker (myself included) that it's due to incompetence and stupidity. That's not fair, actually. The real reason is that retail is not easy (except for corner cigarette and liquor stores…)

    Yes, Apple has been at it for 10 years. Their success is more than remarkable, it is stunning. But balance that against a Circuit City whose core competency was electronic retailing, going on decades, and they failed.

    Apple's out-of-boundaries success doesn't mean it can wade in anywhere it wants. There are certain immutable realities it has to pay attention to, or face failure. Jobs no doubt learned a great deal from his time in the wilderness about husbanding a company's resources.

    I would say that Apple is taking an aggressive but tightly controlled approach to expanding their retail business. They're not going at it indiscriminately (Krispe Kreme, looking at you…) They're looking at their customer base, examining locations, looking for the right fit, and staffing each locale with trained personnel that meet their high standards. Not easy to maintain that store after store.

    $50B is impressive. They have "More money than God" as we say. That doesn't guarantee you success or domination, or else MSFT would have waltzed in 3 years ago and dominated the iPod market, the smartphone market, the tablet market, the PC market, the OS market, the…and so on. Money is one thing, but sustainable organic growth is done at its own pace. And the quality Apple expects from site location, store facilities, personnel and supply channel can only be done at its own pace.

    • Yowsers

      oops – asymco already made the point i was trying to make.

  • http://www.ecolojic.com Joshua

    Did I see some mention of the percentage of people buying from an Apple retail store being new to Mac? Does that deserve a mention, or do we think it's unreliable?

    The Nintendo/Sony comparison was a bit cheeky, but hey, even if it is a one-off quarter, none of us could have guessed they'd get even close a few years back since back then Apple != Gaming.

    • http://www.asymco.com asymco

      Apple management states that 50% of Apple store Mac purchases are "new to Mac" at every earnings conference call. I kind of filtered it out because it's repeated so often.

    • http://www.ecolojic.com Joshua

      True, and fair enough reason to leave it out.

      Personally, I still find it somewhat interesting that this ratio of "new to mac" vs "loyal to mac" continues to hold up so well, especially considering all those pundits who've predicted a shift away<i /> from mac due to recession related budgetary constraints.

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