Ten Billion!
In case anyone has seen the Apple website and the “count-up” to 10B songs, I was a huge nerd and calculated an average of 27 sec per 1000 songs downloaded (if that’s a real counter), and with about 59,680,000 songs to go to hit 10 billion (at the time I did this calculation) it’ll take approximately 331 hours or 13.8 days until the 10 billionth download. So, assuming there’s a huge surge, which is predictable beginning around March 1st, I bet this whole thing is gonna crash iTunes downloads and I’m going to make sure I’m not downloading my podcasts or TV shows at that time.
By the way… $10,000 is a LOT of money. But a $10,000 iTunes gift card? Really? I love music… I love movies… and I love ipod/iphone apps. But really? I don’t know much about the limitations of an iTunes gift card, but last I heard you could only use an iTunes gift card to purchase things that are in iTunes. I could be wrong… but again, I ask… really?!?! 10-grand??
Let me tell y’all a secret. I have been buying from Amazon.com since 2000. I only know that because amazon keeps records of all of your past purchases on your account. Not that I really care or pay that much attention… I just noticed recently when browsing around the “My Account” options. 
I can actually go through and see all of the purchases I’ve made since I bought a book on amazon.com in August of 2000.
That’s not the secret… the secret is that I was totally bored one day and went through every single order I made and added it up, just because I was curious as to how much I’ve spent in almost 10 years from that one company. I won’t tell you exactly what that total was, but I will say that it was not even CLOSE to $10,000. And in that stash of stuff purchased from amazon.com was a 46″ HDTV, stereo receiver/home theater set, many PS2 and PS3 games, dvd players, TONS of DVDs, CDs and Bluray movies, computer hard drives, keyboards, mice, software, shoes, midi keyboard, foot stool, office supplies, printer, books, rice cooker, ceiling fan and many many more things I don’t feel I need to list.
So, knowing that during the span of TEN years I spent much less than $10,000 on all of those things, most of which I still have and use everyday and are part of my everyday life, wondering how I could spend $10K in iTunes alone just baffles me! I don’t spend money just to spend money… I’m actually fairly conservative, regardless of some of the nicer stuff I have. I sacrifice a lot just to be able to afford some of that stuff. But that’s besides the point.
The point is… what in the world would the winner of a $10,000 iTunes gift card do with all of that money? Am I missing something? Can you use it towards buying anything in the Apple store, like computers, ipods and software? If so, then I guess my whole rant is moot. But if it’s limited to only what is available for sale in the iTunes store… WOWZERS!!! I am not going to be envious of the person who actually wins this – IF it’s legit. :)
I think these little givaways and contests are cool and all… but sometimes you look at it and see the mega huge number and say to yourself “WOW, I wanna win!!” But then it all boils down to the details and fine print. I didn’t go through and dissect the hell outta this contest, but as much as I would love to have every album I want in the iTunes store or every movie, this is almost a joke.
Dragging it on and doing the math further, lets say you buy $10,000 of music albums alone. Let’s see… that would be $10,000 divided by the average album that runs $9.99. That would mean you could purchase 1,000 albums. I happen to have 889 albums (60+ GB) in my iTunes collection, or so it says. Some of those “albums” are just unorganized single track tunes I haven’t gotten to yet. But all of that consists of mostly music that I bought on CD starting about 20 years ago. My iTunes collection is close to 1,000 albums, but spans over about 20 years of purchasing CDs – as well as purchasing various iTunes albums in the past 4+ years only. And to think, I am fairly content with my collection of music – not a whole lot that I’m dying to get a hold of these days. (nor the time to listen to it all either).
Looking at this another way… say you get only about 500 music albums and then spend the rest on movies and TV show episodes. The way iTunes works, it auto downloads both the HD and SD versions of any shows that offer it, and as far as I know, you can’t stop it from downloading both. I have purchased some movies on iTunes and although it’s awesome to have on the computer, you can ONLY play it through iTunes, iPhone/iPod or Apple TV. So… yeah, this would be a dream for any Apple fanboy who’s got the entire Apple media collection in their mansion. But you still have to download this stuff. Last I checked (last night) it took about an hour with decently fast DSL internet to get one episode of LOST. So, you spend about $5,000 of that gift card on movies and TV shows… not really gonna ask where you’ll put it, because I know you’ll buy a new HD if needed… but how long will it take you to download it all?? Doing the math again, it were me and my internet connection (not the best, I know, but better than average), seeing that most movies are about $15-$20 (about 294 movies to fulfil the $5K), if it took about 80 min per movie to download, I would be stuck having to wait about 392 hours or about 16 DAYS of just downloading movies. Just the movies.
Gosh, I am probably starting to sound really annoying huh?
(…starting to?) :P
Yeah, I know… I guess this is what happens on little sleep.
Anyway – rant over. I need to get back to work anyway. I needed that break… It was bugging me and I had to say something.
My cell phone bill is due today… crap!