James Delahunty
24 Jan 2005 19:49
Apple has announced that the iTunes music store has now sold more than 250 million legal downloads. This is an increase of 20 million on their last announcement. Apple claims that they sell 1.25m songs a day or more. When you consider the escalation in daily sales, if it keeps up, they should reach a 1 billion downloads mark sometime in 2006. Apple iTunes is by far the most popular legit music download service in the world, managing to stay far ahead of the crowd despite a massive growth in competitors and criticism attacking the iTunes store.
In the U.K. the store now also offers more than 800,000 tracks for download. In the U.S. however, Apple claim there are over 1 million tracks in the iTunes music store. Napster announced in 2004 that they were now offering 1 million tracks in their U.K. store. So once again it seems that the big major record labels are cashing in off music downloads. Now all they need is to figure out a solid way to make billions off P2P and they gain complete control again.
Source:
The Register