Five Billion - The Magic Number

There's so much (very entertaining) noise in the online world that it's sometimes hard to hear the signal and get a sense of quite how big the scale of change taking place is.  However, two figures jumped out at me this week which seem to underline quite how greatly the tectonic plates of marketing and media have shifted.  Apple announced last week that iTunes customers have bought five billion songs making the service America's biggest music retailer.  Whilst in online video world, YouTube served up almost the same number of videos in a single month - July.  Hard to argue with those sort of numbers.  Oh yes, and note iTunes is now serving 50k movies a day!