A few stats & some radio

I saw a version of this somewhere, but wanted to do my own math:

My best estimate is that apple has sold 25M ipods so far. [1]
Half a billion songs have been downloaded from itunes as of two days ago. [2]
Hmm. That's only TWENTY SONGS PER IPOD. So what's on everyone's ipod?

Presumably...
- CDs they've ripped themselves (So that means there's yet more un-rights-protected music out there.)
- Songs from other for-pay online services? Not likely: Napster is currently suing (?) Apple for ipods not allow napster-to-go. So anything from online must be non-rights-protected.)
- Podcasts (un-rights-protected, again.)
- Music they've downloaded from the internet in mp3 format.

Hmm. Interesting.

UPDATE: The reason I got interested in this in the first place is that I'm doing some work on technology use patterns in the US amoung different races. (Ignore the fact for now that I still find American constructions of race to be utterly, utterly bizarre. Hispanic is apparently not a race, except for when it is.) There's a nice study from Pew that mentions that 9% of white americans have ipods, but 16% of english-speaking latinos or blacks. [3] And, on average, latinos and asians have higher monthly cell phone bills than whites or blacks, and blacks are nearly three times as likely as whites to get wireless data on their cellhpones. [4]

And in completely unrelated news, there were a few clips of an interview with me about my Master's thesis work on computerized smell output on Saturday's "Weekend America" on NPR.

http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/index_20050716.html

Which I only noticed because suddenly I was getting hits on my thesis on my webserver from a URL I didn't recognize...

[1]. 20 million by early june http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/apple_passed_20_million_ipods_sold_milestone_in_early_june/
plus 5 million a quarter: http://nextlevelpartner.typepad.com/nxtlvl/2005/06/are_you_podcast.html

[2]. 18 july 05 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/18/apple_itunes_500m/)

[3]. http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/154/report_display.asp

[4]. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/start.html?pg=12