Gwen in a pinkish mood dreaming about all those digital dineros she’s racking up…

I just read that Gwen Stefani’s overplayed, overexposed song “Hollaback Girl” achieved a milestone of sorts — 1 million digital downloads (full story). That’s pretty damn impressive and it’s a first of its kind.

But the really interesting fact is that the song also had 1 million downloads into mobile phones. That’s truly mind-boggling. It basically confirms that the music revolution is definitely being digitized and downloaded en masse.

Of course the indie, unknown artiste side of me likes to quantify what this all means in monetary terms. In a typical digital distribution arrangement, I might get 91% of the sale price of a track downloaded from iTunes or a similar service. (The distributor takes a 9% cut.) I’m not sure if Gwen also gets 91% — I think not — but she’s making beaucoup bucks from other places, so this is probably just a drop in the bucket for her anyway.

As an indie musician though, if I had 1 million song downloads *and* 1 million downloads to mobile devices, assuming each download (typically) costs 99 cents, we are talking major money, folks.

2 million downloads * $0.99 * 0.91 = $1.8 million to the artist

Damn. So all I need is to have a #1 single, total media saturation, distribution deals galore, and I become a millionaire.

I wish it were that simple. But that’s the power of digital distro, in theory.