James Delahunty
23 Jun 2005 8:35
Apple has announced today that its European iTunes music stores have sold 50 million songs collectively since the original stores were launched in the UK, Germany and France. Since that date, the 15th June 2004, more stores have opened up across Europe in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. While it is a massive figure of music downloads, the United States is still a much bigger market for Apple.
When the European stores had launched originally Apple still hadn’t reached 100 million downloads. Earlier this month the company announced it had sold 430 million downloads altogether. That’s about 330 million downloads since June 2004. If you take away Europe’s contribution of 50 million, then you re left with 280 million, which were sold mostly in the United States. This applies even if you take the Canadian store into account, which launched in December.
When the Canadian store launched, U.S. customers were still by the most downloaders. As reported on AfterDawn, a new survey that was released shows that legal downloads could be catching up with piracy. Approximately 35% of music buyers are now downloading songs legally from music stores, just behind 40% who still use P2P networks or other methods to acquire their music. Read more about that survey here.
Source:
The Register