iTunes crosses the 5 Billion Mark

Apple, in its latest conquest claims to have sold over 5 billion songs on iTunes music store. After being launched in April 2003, it took almost three years to sell one billion songs. Of late, the music industry has been abuzz with digital downloads; owing to rapid growth the company recorded towering sales in the past two years.

This follows the revelation last month that iTunes is the biggest music retailer in the United States.

Rival companies do not even stand near. Sales at Amazon.com, the No. 2 digital music store, are hardly a tenth of those at iTunes, according to market researcher NPD Group.

The music catalogue of iTunes has expanded to over eight million tracks and it also offers twenty thousand television episodes and over two thousand films, some 350 of which are available in high definition.

The company said on Tuesday that customers purchase and rent over 5,000 movies each day. These figures should comfortably make it the world's most popular online movie store, as Apple claims.

According to estimations by NPD, the market is not sailing through sound waters and the music spending dropped 10 percent, from $44 to$40 per capita among Internet users and the CD sales are constantly declining. The number of CD consumers plunged by one million in 2007 alone.

The regular music trade is being eaten into by P2P music sharing, which continues to become more and more popular.

The introduction of iPhone and new array of iPods has definitely helped enhance music sales at Apple, further advanced by EMI’s catalog of DRM free tracks.

Apple revolutionized the music industry with the introduction of iPod and now it’s further firming its stand with digital music sales. The company has its ways to lure customers, like the feature called ‘Complete My Album’ which allows people to get a full album at discounted price, if they purchase single tracks from it for $.99 a piece.