What, if Anything, are People Buying on iTunes?

Just for the lack of anything better to do, I looked at a few artists' most popular songs on iTunes. I'd reprint what I found, but I don't want to run afowl of any of Apple's copyrights. To sum it up, though, I found that the most popular songs are the ones that radio plays in regular rotation. That kind of surprised me. I thought that the commonly held belief regarding iPodders was that they had iPods because they didn't like what they heard on the radio. I thought wrong, evidently.

So, how does radio deal with the "threat" of iPods, then? Emmis Communications has partnered with Apple and features iTunes Music Store storefronts on most of their stations' websites. Hear the song on the radio and buy it on iTunes.

I think there's a deeper meaning here. I'm just not sure what it is, quite frankly. It's just something I've been thinking about.

Then again, recent research is showing that iTMS sales are way down. That's not to say that iPod use is down. It just appears that the hipsters who jumped on the fashionable iPod bandwagon a while back are finally realizing that DRM sucks. I imagine they're ripping CDs and using MP3s instead of Apple's restricted format.