Apple's online digital music service iTunes has been named one of Time Magazine's Coolest Inventions 2003.

Interestingly, the Time Magazine article says that after Apple pays all of its costs on the service, it only makes about 10 cents per song. So why continue to support itunes? As Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO explained to Time, "Because were selling Ipods."
Apple also announced (or bragged) last week that it outsold Napster's online music service by a margin of 5 to 1 for the week. And it sounds like they have bragging rights. If Apple makes 10 cents on every song it sells, they made $1.5 million on itunes last week. So if Napster gets roughly the same amount of profits off a song, it pulled in a MEASLY $30,000 in their first week of operation.
Not a good sign, but give them six months like Apple has had, and then do the comparing.
“During Napster’s first week of operation, the iTunes Music Store sold five times as many songs as Napster did—1.5 million versus 300,000,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO in a prepared statement. “The unbeatable combination of iPod and iTunes offers music lovers a seamless experience for buying, managing and listening to their digital music collections anywhere.”


See Also:
MTV Digital Distribution Scheduled To Launch 2004
Napster 2.0 and Napster MP3 Player Review