The word goes Apple doesn’t – or rather, that the real money are made on sales of iPods.
Having just hit the 1 billion downloaded songs mark, can this really be true? At the time being Apple is selling 3 million songs a day at one dollar/euro or what have you of the same value. 3 million tracks a day makes about 1 billion tracks a year. And the number seems to grow with extra-linear pace.
But actually it does not look like iTunes in itself is an Apple cash-cow.
Online music-selling profits are extremely low, might be as low as one or two percent. One million tracks sold makes a yearly revenue of 1 billion dollars, giving Apple a profit of 10-20 million $ a year.
This is nice. But compared to Apples latest quarterly financial statements this still seems rather pale: Although best quarter ever, the figures are astonishing: Total net profits of 585 million $. If these figures hold true for the rest of 2006 as well, iTunes 2006-profits will count for less than one percent of total Apple profits.