Thirty days after the launch of the iTunes App Store, Apple announced that 60 million apps were downloaded in the first month of operations generating sales of $30 million. “This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” Jobs said adding that it may be a “$1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”
Mr. Jobs was being modest.
To see how modest we have the following data:
If the current download rate is maintained (17 million apps/day) and if the pricing of $0.29/app is preserved, then $1.8 billion will have been spent on iOS apps this year.
With the rate of downloads increasing as steeply as it is, $2 billion in sales is not unlikely in the third year of the store. Twice what Jobs was predicting for “some point in time”.
The other line in the graph is the iTunes music download rate. I’ve written about it before and pointed out that the point of inflection in the download rate coincided with the increase in price for songs from $0.99 to $1.29. Not much more to say here except that the trend continues and music downloads continue to slow.
As far as Apple is concerned, the slowdown in iTMS is more than offset by the increase in iTAS. As far as the music industry is concerned, I don’t think CD sales are increasing. Does anyone know?