Greed and iTunes Music Store

When iTunes Store first debuted in 28 April 2003, it took them 8 days to sell 100K songs.

The one billion song milestone was reached on 22 February 2006, or 1301 days since the store was launched.

For the period between 22 Feb 2006 and 6 Jan 2007, or about 318 days, 1 billion songs were sold. Now, between 27 Feb 2008 and 19 Jun 2008, or 113 days, another billion songs were sold, marking the 5 billion song milestone. That is exponential growth. To put that in perspective, Firefox set a Guiness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours... 8,002,530 in 24 hours or 5,557 per second at its peak.

iTunes Store is moving 6,145 songs per second every day, and is still growing.

If the projections hold up, the 6 billion song milestone was passed sometime in late September 2008.

Yet at approximately that time period, the RIAA was asking Apple to increase the royalty fees for each song sold despite making 70 out of every 99 cents[1][2]. Apparently earning US$4,300 per second was not enough for them.