Infographic: How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take?
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How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take?

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How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take?

How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take?

Today’s data visualization comes from David McCandless from Information is Beautiful. Buy their awesome book called Knowledge is Beautiful – we own the physical version, and it’s full of great data visualizations.

How many millions of lines of code does it take to make the modern program, web service, car, or airplane possible?

The range is extraordinary: the average iPhone app has less than 50,000 lines of code, while Google’s entire code base is two billion lines for all services. And interestingly, the code behind machines such as fighter jets, popular video game engines, and even the Large Hadron Collider fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

Increasing Complexity

A million lines of code, if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text. That’s 14x the length of War and Peace.

It’s more than what was needed to run old technologies like the Space Shuttle, a pacemaker, or even the game engine of Quake 3 – but it’s not enough to be the driving force behind the modern software that’s used in everyday life today.

  • The control software to run a U.S. military drone uses 3.5 million lines of code.
  • A Boeing 787 has 6.5 million lines behind its avionics and online support systems.
  • Google Chrome (browser) runs on 6.7 million lines of code (upper estimate).
  • A Chevy Volt uses 10 million lines.
  • The Android operating system runs on 12-15 million lines.
  • The Large Hadron Collider uses 50 million lines.
  • Not including backend code, Facebook runs on 62 million lines of code.
  • With the advent of sophisticated, cloud-connected infotainment systems, the car software in a modern vehicle apparently uses 100 million lines of code. This is according to Wired magazine.
  • All Google services combine for a whopping 2 billion lines.

Applying the math above – that means it would take 36,000,000 pages to “print out” all of the code behind all Google services. That would be a stack of paper 2.2 mi (3.6 km) high!

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A Visual Breakdown of Global Music Consumption

How do people around the world consume their music, and how are these consumption habits changing as technology evolves?
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14 hours ago

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February 6, 2023

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A Visual Breakdown of Global Music Consumption

To maximize any chance of success in the music business, aspiring artists must gain an understanding of how music is consumed and how that is changing alongside technology.

This graphic from Athul Alexander highlights global music consumption habits. Data is from 2022 and is sourced from a survey of over 44,000 people from 22 countries by IFPI that asked people their primary mode for consuming music.

As of 2022, paid subscription services (i.e. Apple Music, Spotify) are the most preferred option for listeners, accounting for nearly one-fourth of main platform share.

RankServiceShareExamples
1Paid Audio Streaming24%Spotify, Apple Music
2Video Streaming19%YouTube
3Radio17%
4Purchased Music10%Vinyls, CDs, purchased digital albums
5Ad-Supported Audio Streaming8%Amazon, Deezer
6Short-form Videos8%TikTok
7Social Media Videos5%Facebook, Instagram
8Live Music4%concerts, livestreams
9Other6%music on TV, phone-to-phone transfers

Short-form video platforms like TikTok, with an 8% share of primary music listeners, are a fast-growing medium. Several young artists have found initial success and traction using these platforms over the past few years.

And though video “killed the radio star,” it hasn’t killed listening to music on the radio. A healthy, 17% of respondents picked radio as their primary avenue for listening to music.

Streaming Supremacy and Virality

There’s no doubt that the internet has revolutionized how music is being consumed.

Including all video and music streaming, internet-based music consumption was the primary choice for 64% of respondents. That’s not even accounting for livestreams or music purchased through the internet.

PlatformShare
Internet-based64%
Non-Internet Based37%

This internet-heavy metric is being reflected on the business side as well, with 75% of the music industry’s revenues in the U.S. coming from streaming.

However, for artists, streaming revenue is usually the third-biggest earner after live performances and sales.

But utilizing streaming to its fullest potential keeps modern artists in the loop. For example, Beyoncé was one of the first artists to utilize streaming platforms to release an album completely unannounced in 2013, a marketing move that has been replicated many times since.

Where does this data come from?

Source: IFPI

Data note: IFPI surveyed over 44,000 people from 22 countries, asking them about their primary mode of consuming music. They exclude India and China from their global figures to prevent the size of the population from influencing the global weighted average. Percentages may also not add up to 100 because of rounded figures.

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