Apple is rapidly approaching their next landmark, 10 Billion songs downloaded via iTunes. They’ve placed a counter on their website and announced that the lucky downloader of that 10-billionth song will receive a $10k iTunes gift card. Robert Kosara has written some scripts to download the currently counter data at regular intervals and created some nice interactive javascript visualization on his site with the data.
The bottom part of the visualization shows the number of downloads as a blue area, and the rate of downloads as a line. The pattern in the background has an edge every six hours, so two gray and two white stripes make up one day. The top view is a circular view, with one full round around the circle representing one day. The gray wedges correspond to the gray stripes in the bottom view, plus there are additional lines for each hour to make comparison easier. The lines are color-coded by the day, so the corresponding data in both views can be identified.
No surprise to see a cyclical shape in the visualization, people download more during daylight that midnight of course, but the the circular graph is a clever way of displaying it.
See all the details, with links to download the data yourself, on his site.
via iTunes Ten Billion Song Downloads Visualization | EagerEyes.org.
