Danny Gorog31 July 2007, 11:46 PM
The iPod/iTunes juggernaught rolls on with Apple announcing that iTunes recently sold its three billionth song. But Nokia has a surprise in the wings...
Today Apple announced that the iTunes store recently sold its three billionth song. It took Apple from April 2003 to February 2006 (33 months) to sell its first billion songs. 11 months later Apple announced sales of two billion songs, and now, seven months later it has passed three billion.
Apple's press release states that 'iTunes is the world’s most popular online music store featuring a catalogue of over four million songs, 7,000 music videos, 100,000 podcasts and 20,000 audiobooks.'
iTunes recently surpassed Amazon and Target to become the third largest music retailer in the US.
There's still no joy however for second-class Aussie iTunes users, though, when it comes to TV shows and movies. The US is still the only country where iTunes plays host to files other than music and podcasts (and a smattering of music videos). Unfortunately, there's still no word when these products will make it to our shores.
Still, with numbers like these, and the fact that Apple sold another ten million iPods in Q2 2007 the iTunes/iPod juggernaught rolls on with no viable challenger in sight.
Nokia getting into the game
A recent Fortune magazine article reports that Nokia are looking to muscle in on Apples turf by setting up a music store akin to the iTunes offering. According to the report 'The new Nokia Web site will let consumers download songs to their PCs and transfer them to mobile phones and other portable music players. Nokia is expected to let users transfer songs to non-Nokia phones using digital-rights-management software.'
The report also indicates that the Nokia store will launch with around a million songs, far short of Apple's four million (or five million for the US) but well ahead of the 200,000 Apple made available at their launch four years ago.
The imminent entry of a Nokia music store sheds some light on why Nokia recently came out with a Nokia media sync tool for Mac users.