It turns out that music's long tail is even longer than many thought. During this week's Apple earning call, company execs boasted there are now 28 million tracks for sale on iTunes. And yesterday, the company's public relations department confirmed 28 million as the new "official" number. That's a jump of 8 million tracks for sale in just over two years on iTunes. But the biggest surprise, is how many fewer tracks Amazon has for sale than Apple.
Amazon MP3 publicly says it offers 19 million tracks on it's digital shelves (precisely 19,697,747 as of Friday morning). That's a whopping 8.4 million fewer tracks than iTunes.
19 million is still a huge number; and the smaller selection probably won't matter to anyone until they go looking for that obscure band from Zambia that they heard on Radio Paradise. If iTunes has it and Amazon does not, Apple has won another fan for life.
