Slate reports on the unveiling of Billboard Magazine’s digital download charts. True, it’s been a long time since the Billboard charts mattered to me (although I was an “American Top 40″ fanatic for a while when I was 9 or 10). Here’s one interesting observation:

Billboard says that Apple, the most aggressive player in this market so far, is selling an average of 500,000 tracks a week. If that’s true, and it takes just 1,500 sales to be No. 1, then the variety of tracks that people are downloading must be extremely broad—particularly compared with, say, the variety of tracks that make up a typical Top 40 station’s play list.

Thanks to Kimbro Staken for the pointer…