The Numbers Game - 9 Sep 2010 - by gins

Ten years ago, we were all caught up in the swirl of analyst reports covering how many billions would be spent on optical networking, how many eyeballs were destined to the latest new media website, or how many sock puppets a business model made. Thus, whenever I see the 'B' world floated around, it catches my interest.

Yesterday, Asymco reported that the total number of iapps downloaded would equal iTunes music downloads sometime this year. Today, the iTunes count is approx. 12 billion while the appstore count is closer to 7. Sure, that is an important observation, but the less informed may leave thinking that the iThing's day for music is over. The reality is quite the opposite.

I've got 7700 songs on my iTunes server (all legal, with the CDs collecting dust in the basement). This is 39GB. At any time, I've transferred between 3-5GB to my iPad or those of my kids. Only about 20 in total have been purchased from the iTunes store. While gaming, the kids play music (though my multitasking ability isn't quite there). With true multitasking in a few months enabling the likes of Pandora and Spotify, this will become the norm for many surfing the web or composing an email.

What the numbers do show, however, is the increasing stickiness of the icosystem... the power of recommendation in driving impulse downloads, and disposable applications - those that you download once, kick around a bit, and then push off to the side. You know what would be fun? A tracker much like that which exists for Windows that groups application by last use and time... how many are opened on a daily or weekly basis, and how usage falls off over time (irrespective of how many new levels the Angry Birds folks crank out... I see this firsthand at home). Now that info I'd share. We could make a game of the numbers.