Petteri Pyyny
16 Oct 2004 14:57
Apple celebrated yesterday when it announced that they have sold now more than 150 million songs via their iTunes Music Store. Despite some reports that overall traffic to online music stores has dropped, Apple's announcement means that its own sales have increased rather dramatically. Their current pace means that they're selling more 4 million songs a week, more than 200 million songs a year.
It took Apple 17 months to sell 150 million songs and now it seems that they're speeding ahead of their competition quite rapidly, specially when the all-important holiday season is approaching. Obviously iTunes also benefited from the fact that it is now available in three European countries as well as in the United States -- and Apple has vowed to launch its pan-European service within next few weeks that would bring in millions of potential new customers.
Even more crucial to the company is the success of its portable audio player, iPod, which is the only player that Apple's iTunes songs support. And Apple announced this week that it sold over 2 million iPods during its past financial quarter (three month period). iPods are the money-making machine for Apple, while iTunes doesn't really generate any profits whatsoever to the company, but instead help it maintain its iPod sales levels.
Source: VNUNet