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iPod 500 Millionth Download Promotion

waltchan said:
WHY:

If a person just won and is the 500,000,000 downloaded song, the person may or may not know Coldplay and does not care about it. Not everybody in this world know the band Coldplay. So, if the backstage tickets are handed to him or her, there is a always a chance that he or she may just toss it out, and then the prize turns out to be a waste in the end. What's more, it wastes Coldplay members' time dealing with non-Coldplay fans. Maybe the iPods giveaway will do well, but not everyone cares about Coldplay. It's not really fair to see a person who won the Coldplay tickets and does not care about it.
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Dude, it's a concert, in England. If the band doesn't suck, who cares if you don't know them before going? you should be able to enjoy them, anyway. If you know all the songs by heart, anyway, you're not going for the music, are you?

Now imagine someone who will love Coldplay hearing them for the first time as a result of this trip. That's great. Insanely great, even.

And if the band sucks, hey, it's England! They'll be glad they got to go before the impending Olympics doubled and tripled all the prices.
 
artifex said:
Dude, it's a concert, in England. If the band doesn't suck, who cares if you don't know them before going? you should be able to enjoy them, anyway. If you know all the songs by heart, anyway, you're not going for the music, are you?

Now imagine someone who will love Coldplay hearing them for the first time as a result of this trip. That's great. Insanely great, even.

And if the band sucks, hey, it's England! They'll be glad they got to go before the impending Olympics doubled and tripled all the prices.
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It's in England?

I was hoping I'd win, go to the concert (that I thought was in NYC), ditch the concert and go to the Soho apple store. :) :)
Coldplay is OK, but they aren't my cup of tea.
I'd still freaking love the prize, though!
yeah, I'm a goober.
 
katie ta achoo said:
It's in England?

I was hoping I'd win, go to the concert (that I thought was in NYC), ditch the concert and go to the Soho apple store. :) :)
Coldplay is OK, but they aren't my cup of tea.
I'd still freaking love the prize, though!
yeah, I'm a goober.
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Weellllll... someone else said it was, and I believed them without checking. However:
concert tickets to a Coldplay concert at a date and location within Apple’s discretion
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and it goes on to say Apple will try to work with the winner on that, so it could be NYC :)
 
artifex said:
and it goes on to say Apple will try to work with the winner on that, so it could be NYC :)
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GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY!
Can I choose it to be at Steve Jobs' house?

I bet he has a sweet mac setup... and some awesome apple shirts to ...borrow...


Hooo, if (haha HA!) I won, and went to nyc, I could do college visits, iTunes winningness, and Apple Soho ALL IN ONE!

*pop*
oh, sorry. That was the sound of my brain exploding when thinking about doing viola at Julliard. ^_^


**enters 200 more times**
 
It took a while to build, but here's the iTunes 500 Millionth Song Countdown page.

I have little to no knowledge of javascript, so this is actually generated by a C++ program I wrote on my computer which generates the pages every 5 minutes. This displays the data for the last 24 hours at 10 minute intervals (the smoothest presentation I could get with the variance in Apple's counter updates) with an estimate for next 10 million based on current download rates. Should refresh every 5 minutes. Graphical alerts and iTunes links for quick access to the music store as well. Enjoy!

<!--Credit where credit is due-->
Many thanks to itunescount.tijdweb.nl which generates the raw data my program uses to generate the page. Try as I might, I couldn't get the XML counter to work with my program, so without this, I couldn't run the program (btw, if my use of this is a problem, let me know and I'll take the site down).

Edit: Now estimates for next 100,000...got me numbers wrong :p
 
katie ta achoo said:
GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY!
Can I choose it to be at Steve Jobs' house?

I bet he has a sweet mac setup... and some awesome apple shirts to ...borrow...
Click to expand...

That brings up an interesting, although slightly off topic, subject I've often wondered about.
What do you think Steve Jobs has as his personal computer at home and how often does he upgrade? I know he has a Mac, but do you think he has a G5 2.7 DP maxed out with memory and HD space sitting alongside a 30" Cinema Display? I mean he is Steve Jobs, and could have the newest, latest and greatest everytime it was released; but would it be worth the hassle of having to transfer all of your files from one computer to another every 6 months or so? Perhaps he has a first gen G5 2.0 DP maxed out. That is still a very solid computer and he might not see the need to upgrade everytime something new is released.
On the other hand, he might have his entire house networked utilizing Xserve and have all of his files stored on a huge multi-terabyte raid array. That would enable him to just plug and play with the new computers as they came along; and who knows? He may be running an as of yet unnanounced PowerPC upgraded Mac, or a Macintel box.
 
artifex said:
Why can't you buy them on CD, use iTunes to rip them, and then have a nice hard backup for when your hard drive eventually dies? It's actually cheaper in many cases, if you use online retailers, at least here in the USA.
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Which is what I do (and I'm in the US). I find that the CDs I buy from BMG Music end up costing an average of about $8 per disc (including shipping) if I take advantage of the special offers they publish every month.

This is about the same price as a typical iTunes album purchase. And with typical albums containing 10-12 songs, the per-song price is significantly less than iTunes.

And, in addition to all this, you have a physical CD with better sound quality and no copy protection. And often liner notes with lyrics, pictures and commentary. And you can still use iTunes to rip the tracks for playback on the computer or on iPods.
 
Major props for all your guys hard work again. Last year i bought tracks at least a couple of times within a second or two and exactly (at least to the second anyways) for the last one (believe it or not). Alas, i've won no ipods:( And i'm too poor to buy one (too busy saving up for my next laptop:) so i'm trying again. One idea to add for the guy who made the graphs i don't know if its too hard to but it would be cool if you could do a zoom level or set the range some how. thanks again you guys rock!

uber
 
Is it just me or has the count slowed down recently? It seemed to shoot up to 495 000 000, but I think it has slowed since.

It does point to the 500 000 000th on monday, or maybe on tuesday to coincide with new iBooks and Mac Minis.
 
BLAST! I almost got the 497,900,000th song but was thwarted by the "enter your password" (which I never usually have to do) and the "Are you SURE you want this song?" dialogs.
 
I actually won an iPod in the last promo by trying to time my purchase. Of course it was pure luck that I had the winning number in that timeframe, but still...

that won't stop me from trying again!
 
Yes, I guess it might end during the middle of the night in the United States? If so, the songs might sell at a slower rate than, if it was in prime-time as it was last year on the west coast of the United States. I don't know. Surely, during the night, or tomorrow morning, it will hit the mark.
 
I'd tend to aim more towards Sunday late afternoon, early evening (US) for the 500,000,000 mark. It seems to be around 1.6 million songs are selling a day. But then, it's hard to say how much it will speed up. The 100 mil mark last year caused a much larger jump in downloads than in previous 100K marks, and that was with only a few countries participating.

Of course, the skeptic in me suggests that Apple could just be feeding us all inaccurate / delayed readings and all our careful download plans could be completely off. :D
 
Whyren said:
Of course, the skeptic in me suggests that Apple could just be feeding us all inaccurate / delayed readings and all our careful download plans could be completely off. :D
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Yeah, that counter on their website isn't right, just goes at a certain pace. Of course, that means as soon as it starts to get anywhere near it we just have to buy songs constantly until the winner is announced, right?
 
Ja Di ksw said:
Yeah, that counter on their website isn't right, just goes at a certain pace. Of course, that means as soon as it starts to get anywhere near it we just have to buy songs constantly until the winner is announced, right?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, there is no real-time download counter (but that would sort of ruin the fun). Apple's counter is accurate so far as taking data from the XML counter they have, but early on in the promotion, they reprogrammed the javascript counter to make the rate 80% of what the data presents. They may have done this simply to prevent the counter from "jumping backwards", or purposefully make it inaccurate, or perhaps they have a better idea of what the rates are doing than we do.

I'd guess that the XML data is at least fairly accurate since I can't really think of a reason why Apple would purposefully mislead consumers. Plus, last year's counters and estimators turned out to be fairly accurate when compared to the actual winning download times (I believe).
 
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