iTunes sales slump claims wrong says Jobs

Stan Beer
Thursday, 11 January 2007 00:58

IT Industry - Strategy

Claims made last month that iTunes sales are collapsing were wrong according to Apple boss Steve Jobs. In December, analyst group Forrester made the claim based on credit card transaction information.  According to Jobs, however, sales are booming and he cited figures to back his claim.

“We have crossed a major milestone. We have sold more than 2 billion songs on iTunes,” Jobs told the audience at his opening keynote address.

“There was an article recently that said iTunes sales have slowed dramatically. I don’t know what data they were looking at but this is our data and what we see is that iTunes sales are really up this past year.
 
“It took us over three years to get to a billion songs. We got our second billion in 10 months in 2006. We couldn’t be happier with the growth rate of iTunes. We are selling over 5 million songs a day – that’s 58 songs every second.”

Jobs also announced that iTunes had passed Amazon in music sales to become the fourth largest music reseller in the US, behind Target, Best Buy and Walmart, all of whom sell CDs. “And you can guess who our next target might be,” Jobs joked.

According to Jobs, iTunes sales are also growing in both TV shows and movies.

“I am very pleased to report that we have sold over 50 million TV shows,” said Jobs.

Jobs also announced that Apple has sold 1.3 million Disney movies on iTunes in the first four months of offering the movie download service.