< A href="http://www.apple.com/">Apple Computer announced Tuesday that its iTunes Music Store (iTMS) now has over one million songs available for download in the US, making it "the first and only online digital music service to offer consumers a million song catalog," the company said.
Apple said it still maintains a 70% market share of legal downloads for singles and albums, making it the worldis number one online music service.
In actual fact, Apple is calculating its own market share number based on its knowledge of downloads from the iTunes Music Store, and working backwards from the total number of online music service downloads reported by Nielsen/SoundScan, according to reliable industry sources familiar with the online music industry.
The company operates the iTMS in the UK, France and Germany, as well as the US. Industry estimates are that a little less than 500,000 songs are available in each of the other European country iTMS fronts.
iTMS debuted in April, 2003 with about 200,000 songs in its catalog. The store works on both Mac OS X and Windows, and enables users to download individual singles for US$0.99 and many complete albums for $9.99. The service enables users to play songs on up to five computers, burn songs onto CDs as many times as necessary, and play digital music on the iPod, Appleis popular portable digital music player.