Report: iPod users not buying music from iTunes as much as they're buying CDs

A look behind the iPod/iTunes report - Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus

This analysis pops up every year, it seems. Someone does the math on how many songs iTunes has sold and divides by the number of iPods are out there, and the number they end up with is pretty small.

I'm one of those people. Here's a screenshot of my Purchased folder in iTunes (7):

I've had an iPod for almost 2 years now (since the first Shuffles came out in Jan 2005) and I have five songs Purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Three of those are from the 5-track sampler that I got free when I registered my Shuffles. I deleted two of those songs since because they suck. I like TKO so that'll always be around. The other two haven't been listened to recently enough for me to decide whether to delete them...though the Blow It Out track has a 1-star rating, which I use as a "this sucks" marker. I'm a bit of a NIN fanboy, so when The Hand That Feeds came out, iTunes was the faster way to get it (I have the CD single too, and the vinyl picturedisc). I needed Cars for something relatively quickly so I didn't have time to track down a copy of The Pleasure Principle to use it from there.

I will probably always prefer buying CDs over digital downloads of songs. Gary Numan's Replicas album is $9.99 on iTunes, and it's $11.98 at Amazon. For that extra $2, I get a non-compressed version of the album, all of the artwork and a physical CD and an MP3 version for my iPod (after importing it to iTunes, of course). I consider that to be a better value than the iTunes version where all I get is a DRM'd AAC file.

There's always a risk when buying recent albums that you get a couple good songs and a bunch of filler crap, which kinda kills the value argument. Some times I do better at avoiding that issue than other times. I used to buy a lot of singles. Lately, I just avoid bands that do that altogether. Going indie helps (I love CDBaby) since unsigned bands have less of a reason to add filler crap to an album. I think that's another topic for another post though.

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