Apple sells 3.3 million songs on iTunes
Reuters
San Francisco, May 6: Apple Computer Inc's iTunes online music store broke its one-week sales record after the computer maker updated its music player software with new features including the ability for users to publish play lists, the company said on Wednesday.
Apple, maker of the Macintosh computer and the popular iPod digital MP3 music player, said it had sold 3.3 million songs on iTunes since the online music store's relaunch one week ago. The previous peak was 2.7 million songs per week, an Apple spokeswoman said.
Cupertino, California-based Apple reported 3 million downloads of iTunes 4.5, which incorporates the online music store, since its release last week.
Apple executives said the timing of the release helped boost sales on days that would have otherwise been slow.
"Because we rolled out on a Wednesday, we increased traffic on days that would have been slightly slower for us," Eddie Cue, Apple's vice president of applications, told Reuters. The music store's busiest days have been Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday, he said.
Apple's announcement came a day after Sony Corp., the pioneer in portable music with its Walkman players, launched its own online music store, Sony Connect. That store features pricing virtually identical to Apple's and, like Apple, offers the ability to copy songs to portable players or burn them to CDs.
Apple now has nearly 50 percent of the market for MP3 players and says its iTunes music store claims 70 percent of all songs sold by online music stores.
The company also said users had downloaded more than 500,000 free songs during a promotion giving away tracks by popular artists including Courtney Love and Nelly Furtado.
Apple said users published more than 20,000 custom playlists to the music store in the week since it was upgraded with that new feature and others.
The iTunes music store now has more than 700,000 tracks available for purchase, an increase from 200,000 when it launched the service just over a year ago. Tracks cost 99 cents and albums, which account for about 40 percent of music sold, typically cost $9.99.
In addition to being able to publish playlists, which Apple calls iMix, to the online store, iTunes 4.5 also allows for the automatic conversion of songs in Microsoft Corp.'s WMA, or Windows Media Audio, to AAC, a standard format that Apple uses for its iPod and the store.
On April 28 Apple said it had sold 70 million songs through the store in its first year, well short of its original goal of 100 million but more, the company said, than any other digital music service.
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