Contrary to several reports that appeared in the media late last year, Apple continues to enjoy strong iTunes sales and year-over-year growth, selling 1 billion songs in 2006, for an overall total of 2 billion songs sold.
“There was an article recently that said iTunes sales have slowed dramatically. I don’t know what data they’re looking at,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “What we see is iTunes sales were really up this year. We doubled the number of songs we sold in 2006. We are selling over 5 million songs a day. Isn’t that unbelievable? 58 songs every second.”
Jobs went on to note that Apple has now surpassed Amazon to become the fourth largest music retailer in the U.S.
Apple also announced that more than 50 million television episodes and 1.3 million feature-length films have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store.