by , 1:20 AM EDT, April 15th, 2005
Customers of Apple's iTunes Music Store (iTMS) have purchased and downloaded more than 350 million songs, a transcript from Wednesday's conference call with has analysts revealed.
Unlike previous announcements that Apple's online service had hit certain milestones, Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer made the announcement as a quick passing comment during his opening remarks to analysts Wednesday. The Mac Observer found the comment in reviewing a transcript of the conference call late Thursday.
"Last week we crossed the 350 million songs download milestone and despite the increased competition, our share of (the) online music market in the U.S. has remained at or above the 70% level as measured by Nielsen SoundScan," Mr. Oppenheimer said.
Nielsen/SoundScan has confirmed to TMO that it does not and has never broken down online music market share figures, despite Mr. Oppenheimer's comment. In actually fact, Apple is calculating it's own market share number based on its knowledge of downloads from its iTMS and subtracting from the total number of online music service downloads reported weekly by Nielsen/SoundScan.
An Apple spokesperson was not immediately available for comment to confirm the exact date the company hit the 350 million download mark. If it happened on Wednesday, April 6, the company has sold some 1.38 million songs daily in the last 36 days.
Apple last reported it surpassed 300 million in online music sales on March 2.
The iTMS is available for Mac and Windows personal computers and works exclusively with Apple's line of iPod digital media devices. The iTMS is available in 15 countries. In the U.S., the service features more than one million songs and more than 9,000 audiobooks.
| iTunes Music Store Key Dates | |
|---|---|
| April 28, 2003 | Apple Launches iTunes Music Store |
| May 6, 2003 | One million songs sold on iTMS |
| May 14, 2003 | Two million songs sold on iTMS |
| June 23, 2003 | Five million songs sold on iTMS |
| September 8, 2003 | Ten million songs sold on iTMS |
| October 16, 2003 | Apple & Pepsi launch giveaway of 100 million free songs |
| October 20, 2003 | One million copies of iTunes for Windows downloaded in less than four days |
| November 6, 2003 | 1.5 million songs sold on iTMS in one week |
| December 15, 2003 | 25 million songs sold on iTMS |
| March 15, 2004 | 50 million songs sold on iTMS |
| April 28, 2004 | Over 70 million songs sold on iTMS |
| May 5, 2004 | 3.3 million songs sold on iTMS in one week |
| June 15, 2004 | Apple launches iTMS in UK, France & Germany |
| June 23, 2004 | iTMS in Europe sells 800,000 songs in first week |
| July 12, 2004 | 100 million songs sold on iTMS |
| August 10, 2004 | iTMS catalog tops one million songs |
| October 14, 2004 | 150 million songs sold on iTMS |
| October 26, 2004 | Apple launches iTMS in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain |
| November 30, 2004 | Apple launches iTMS in Canada |
| December 16, 2004 | 200 million songs sold on iTMS |
| January 6, 2005 | Apple launches iTMS in Ireland |
| January 24, 2005 | 250 million songs sold on iTMS |
| March 2, 2005 | 300 million songs sold on iTMS |
| April 6, 2005 | 350 million songs sold on iTMS |