iTunes creates new record: 50 million song downloads in Europe |
|
|
Published
:
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 18:05
|
While music publishers continue to rant about losing revenue to piracy, Apple’s iTunes Music Store has quietly gone about creating a record of sorts in sales of legally downloadable songs. Yesterday the technology company’s iTunes Music Store reported to have “sold and delivered 50 million songs.”
Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president, Applications, said the company was thrilled at this achievement and would like to “thank European music fans for making iTunes such a success.” In June last year, the company had opened iTunes Music Stores in France, Germany and the UK and soon included other European countries such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireand, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
In just a year, the stores had registered a total of 50 million downloads of songs from the site’s all seventeen European locations which speaks volumes about their enormous popularity and the great shopping convenience they provide. Each song download costs 79p in the UK. In over two years since the service was launched, the combined sales through iTunes Stores in 19 countries have crossed 430 million downloads. iTunes sales now account for over 80 percent of the legal digital music market’s revenue.
Users appreciate the easy access they get to Apple’s online music stores and also their catalog of over 1 million songs. The service has also helped keep the Apple brand highly visible outside of the IT industry.
The success of iTunes has prompted software giant Microsoft to pull up its socks and look for an opening in this arena. You could expect their next foray into the digital music market.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Print this Story
