Apple announced Monday that its iTunes Music Store has sold more than 250 million songs since first going online. The company said that users of the download service are now downloading 1.25 million songs per day — an annual run-rate of about 500 million songs per year.
“When we launched the iTunes Music Store we were hoping to sell a million songs in the first six months — now we’re selling over a million songs every day, and we’ve sold over a quarter billion songs in total. iTunes is leading the way into the digital music era and together with iPod is changing the way millions of music lovers find and enjoy their music,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
The iTunes Music Store first opened in April, 2003, offering users in the United States the ability to download commercial music tracks for 99 cents each. At the time it debuted, the service was available to Mac users only. Apple followed up in October, 2003 with a Windows-compatible version. In 2004 the iTunes Music Store expanded internationally. It’s now available in 15 countries which represent 70 percent of the global music market, according to Apple.