The Apple website has announced that it was the band Coldplay’s song Speed of Sound off their new X&Y album that reigned in as the one billionth song legally downloaded from the iTunes Music Store.
The Apple website has announced that it was the band Coldplay’s song Speed of Sound off their new X&Y album that reigned in as the one billionth song legally downloaded from the iTunes Music Store.
The song was purchased by Alex Ostrovsky from Michigan. Ostrovsky is the lucky person who walks away with a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generations iPods and a ten thousand dollar Music Card. But there’s more.
Besides these generous prizes, Apple will also establish a scholarship to the highly acclaimed Juilliard School of music in New York, in Ostrovsky’s name.
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple was quoted on various websites as having said about the occassion "I hope that every customer, artist and music company executive takes a moment to reflect on what we’ve achieved together during the past three years", he continued over 1 billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet.
iTunes was launched in April 2003 and sold its first million tracks in just five days. After one year iTunes boasted 70million downloads. Half a billion songs had been downloaded by July 2005 when Amy Greer downloaded Mississipi Girl by Faith Hill.
Johnathan Sasse iRiver CEO said the following about the iPod. As good as the iPod is, it’s really not that spectacular of a device, designing a better product than the iPod is not the real trick.
Getting the mindshare of the consumer and getting people aware that there are other places to get content than iTunes is really our biggest challenge."
However while other companies like Microsoft and Amazon have talked about creating their own services to challenge iTunes, and consumer electronics makers like Sony have tried to rival the iPod by introducing their own mp3 players, no existing service or product has had the same success and prominence as the Apple iPod thus far.
sources: www.apple.com and abcnews.go.com and www.mp3.com/stories
