iTunes Music Store sells 25 billionth song

Apple has sold its 25 billionth song through the iTunes Music Store, the company announced Wednesday.

The record-setting track, “Monkey Drums” (Goksel Vancin Remix) by Chase Buch, was bought by Germany’s Phillip Lüpke—a display of Apple’s dominance in the worldwide music download market: The iTunes music store is available in 119 countries, while rival companies Google, Microsoft, and Amazon make tunes available in a fraction of those markets.

Lüpke will receive a €10,000 iTunes gift card. At current exchange rates, the price works out to roughly $13,525—enough to keep him in music downloads for a very long time.

The iTunes Store originally opened in April 2003, meaning the company is on pace to sell more than 2.5 billion tracks per year during the service’s first year in existence. But that once-disruptive service increasingly faces challenges from streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, and a music industry still struggling to deal with the changes that Apple wrought may find itself in further turmoil as a result.

On Wednesday, though, Apple was only in the mood to celebrate.  Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, said that the iTunes Music Store averages 15,000 downloaded tracks per minute. “We are grateful to our users,” he said in a statement, “whose passion for music over the past 10 years has made iTunes the No. 1 music retailer in the world.”