"As we cross this historic milestone, we want to thank our
customers, the artists and the music labels who have embraced our
dream for iTunes," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
The US iTunes store launched at the end of April last year and
quickly became the most successful fee-based service for authorised
music downloads. The company sold one million downloads in its
first week, but missed its target of 100 million downloads by the
end of the first year by around 30 million songs.
Late on Sunday the target was finally met when Kevin Britten of
Hays, Kansas, downloaded Somersault (Dangermouse remix) by Zero7.
The lucky 20-year-old gets a PowerBook, an iPod, a voucher for
10,000 iTunes songs and an invitation to create his own Celebrity
Playlist to be published on the iTunes Music Store, in addition to
the phone call he has already received from Steve Jobs.
Apple's iTunes opened in the UK, France and Germany in June,
offering single downloads for a price of €0.99, or £0.79 in the UK,
and a catalogue of 700,000 songs. The new stores sold over 800,000
songs in their first week of operation, 450,000 of them in the
UK.
