iTunes costs nearly $1 Billion a year to run

According to a report by Asymco, Apple’s average iTunes operation costs nearly $75 million dollars per month. This is more than double 2009’s average monthly costs of $30 million. The rise is credited to the new features Apple has recently implemented into iTunes as well as the 18 million apps downloaded each day. In case you didn’t catch Apple’s September 1st keynote, that’s roughly 200 apps per second.

At this moment, the total yearly operational costs for Apple is somewhere in the $900 million range (75 million x 12 months), and since iTunes is only growing with more and more content, the one billion mark is sure to hit very soon. These costs cover purchasing abilities from 160 million credit-card carrying iTunes customers, and all the content that gets downloaded to Macs, PC’s and the 120 million iOS devices rocking today. Maybe that $1 billion data center will help out later this year.

iTunes to date has sold over 450 million TV shows, 100 million films, 12 billion tunes, and 35 million books. That’s on top of the 6.5 billion apps people have downloaded. That’s an app for every person on the planet!