James Delahunty
11 May 2005 2:22
Apple's iTunes music store has now sold over 400M songs the company has announced. It also announced that the company is opening iTunes in four more countries including Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland. According to Apple the store is now available in 19 nations and covers 70 percent of the music buying population in the world. ITMS chief Eddy Cue said the company is now selling over half a billion songs a year.
iTunes remains the biggest online music download service; accounting for about 70 percent of all legal music downloads on the Internet. The company also has the success of the iPod to be happy about. The rising sales figures does show that a lot of people are willing to buy their music downloads even though the number of illegitimate downloads are much higher than legal ones.
Despite the growing number of legit downloads and the growing demand for them, the recording industry still continues to sue music file sharers under the same claims they made at the beginning of their campaign, and have no plans to stop. Meanwhile, other music download services are attempting to eat into Apple's share of the market with new services, like Napster and Real's "music rental" services.
Source:
The Register