I found this article interesting..... http://www.itunesperipod.com/
just a couple of observations though

1/ you can - subtract almost every iPod from all non iTMS countries from the total sold.
probably greatly increasing the ratio of songs per ipod in iTMS countries

2/ but not all 2.9 million iPods sold are still working... (Im on my 3rd iPod and the previous 2 are dead - and I am sure I am not the only one)
the dead iPods would increase the ratio.

3/ I suspect that most songs on most iPods are ripped from CD's legitamately owned by the iPod owner.... sure there will be some iPods heavily ladened with pirated music but there are others where the mix will be closer to 75% legit music and 25% pirated.... (of course my figures are only anecdotal and I would be happy to stand corrected).

and that kind of nullifies the main premise of the above website.

EDIT - just corrected point 1. My logic tripped me up.

Yeah, imagine what the ratio would have been on 28 April 2003 - a big fat ZERO!

To go from zero to 21 in one year reflects pretty impressive sales on the iTunes Music Store, and to go from 21 to about 70-odd in the second year is spectacular!

The bottom line is that (for the US at least) these figures are meaningless since they belie the reason the iPod was created in the first place: not as a vehicle for iTunes (rather vice versa), but as a way to store all of your music (whether ripped from CD or otherwise) in one small portable music player...

... and notwithstanding the fact that in Australia, achieving this main functionality is still stupidly technically illegal...

Uh, yeah, I think it's really stupid that they only barely touch on CD-ripping. Most people, even prolific users of iTMS still buy CDs. I'd guess that at least 65% of my 5116-song library is ripped from CDs I have bought.

Kuma, perhaps we should start a similar ratio watch when (IF!) the iTunes Music Store Australia comes out - because right now there's about a million to zero, meaning about 3-5% of our population are dirty copyright infringers (and that's excluding the other 90% that use VCRs).

I'm not sure how many iPods have been sold in Australia - I've heard the one million figure bandied about, but that sounds a bit much - I'd think more like 600,000 or something, but haven't seen any official figures (thanks for your transparency, Apple Australia!)

I haven't seen any download figures for BigPond Music, Ninemsn or Destra services, but I'd be surprised if their sales numbered in the hundreds of thousands (let alone millions) - and I similarly doubt there'd be more than a hundred thousand non-iPod WMA players owned by Australians.

It would be interesting to see what the numbers are...

of course one of the countries with a huge iPod penetration is Japan... and their iTMS is about to launch... I am sure that the ratio will grow rapidly there.

But as for home it would be really interesting to see what the hard numbers are.