Four million songs disappear from Apple iTunes – Typo or conspiracy?
By Dave Parrack
Apple iTunes has grown from a niche way of purchasing music online to becoming one of the biggest selling music retailers in the world in the space of just five years. However, the iTunes Store does not contain 10 million songs as was recently claimed. So was it a genuine typo or a deliberate mistake?
Everyone who uses the Internet knows about the existence of iTunes these days. Even if they don’t use the service, and aren’t a big fan of the DRM heavy, control freak rules which Apple puts in place for the service, they at least know that it exists and what it does.
Last week saw the Apple iTunes Store turn five years old, although the software has been with us a few years more than that. To celebrate, Apple posted a self congratulatory note on the iTunes Store page, including the line “Today there are more than 10 million songs available.”
10 million? Really? That’s after an announcement earlier on in April which boasted that the iTunes Store now contained 6 million songs. That’s a whopping 4 million songs added for purchase in the space of a month!
Of course it wasn’t actually true, and when this fact was brought to Apple’s attention, the site was changed so that the true current figure of just over 6 million was back in place. But it begs the question of whether this was a simple typo, or something a bit more contrived.
Typos certainly happen, all the time, even here on Blorge. Just scan through this article and you’ll probably find at least one of the little buggers. But there’s a big difference between 6 and 10, and I fail to see how that number was mistakenly given as the true figure.
The 4 million songs didn’t disappear as some have claimed, as they never existed in the first place. What is confusing however is how this sort of monumental cock-up can be allowed to happen, especially by a company like Apple which seems to pride itself on professionalism.
MacNN has before and after pictures of the website posting, which regardless of whether it was a cock-up or conspiracy, is funny nonetheless.
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May 5th, 2008
Could it be that the other “4 million” were not songs, but other I-Tunes items such as videos, television shows, movies and podcasts that Apple mistakenly counted?