Apps to outsell music on Itunes

APPS FOR ITHINGS have multiplied at such a ridiculous rate that they're set to overtake music downloads from Itunes this year.

Just one month after launching the Itunes apps store, Apple announced that its punters had pushed sales to $30 million. Apparently this trend shows no signs of abating and the exponential growth rate is set to see apps overtake music downloads.

A Finnish analyst outfit called Asymco blogged this somewhat startling finding. The company posted a graph of Itunes download rates and concluded that apps are outpacing music downloads by two to one.

Asymco took data from the Itunes music launch in September 2004 and compared it against data from the apps launch in 2008.

"As can be seen, the App store has reached the same total downloads in 2.2 years as the Itunes Music Store reached after five years. The two curves are likely to be the same height (around 13 billion each) before the year is over," wrote Asymco.

In an earlier posting last week, Asymco reckoned the drop off in music sales coincided with the Itunes music price hike from $0.99 to $1.29.

It still costs only $0.29 for an app so most users don't mind getting stuff they don't need at all because it's so cheap.

Asymco went on to say in that it reckons apps will be a billion dollar business.

"If the current download rate is maintained (17 million apps/day) and if the pricing of $0.29/app is preserved, then $1.8 billion will have been spent on iOS apps this year," it concluded. µ