According to market intelligence site asymco.com, the number of apps downloaded from the Apple App Store will soon pass the number of songs downloaded from iTunes. They base this on recent data that shows that app downloads reached the same total in just over 2 years that the iTunes music store took about five years to achieve. Asymco.com indicates that the data shows they will both be around 13 billion by the end of 2010.

from asymco.com - Apps vs Songs download data

Some are speculating that this data shows just how much piracy is hurting the online music industry. It could be a little from piracy, a little from Pandora-like sites and little from increased competition from other music stores like Amazon MP3 that may be contributing to this.

But it’s a tough thing to compare the two, really. iOS apps can only be acquired from the App Store, at least for non-jailbroken devices. There aren’t alternatives for those users. That combined with the fact that many apps cost nothing to download, it’s easy to see how this can happen.