No Rock And Roll Fun

NUMBER CRUNCHING, SUCKING, AND NIBBLING: The Register has got some analysis of the latest trends in music downloads and the Microsoft v Apple war acoming. Some of the tastier figures are:

Apple has now sold two million iPods, and 150 million iTunes downloads. This works out as an average of every iPod owner buying 75 songs, then, which - if we take at face value the claims that Apple clears only a couple of cents profit on each download - still makes a healthy return in anyone's books.

The number of MP3s on people's computers is falling, as people are deleting faster than they download. There was a drop of 742 million mp3 files in the US between summer 2003 and 2004. Which means that all that RIAA panic about losing sales? Proven again to be bollocks, as if they had sold those tracks on CD, they would have been returned to the store. Illegal downloading, in short, isn't stealing sales, it's just putting the Customer Services desks of Virgin Megastores out of business.

MP3's share is starting to slip - 72 per cent of all PC stored music against 82 per cent a year ago.