Zune Marketplace catching up with iTunes?

Microsoft's Zune Marketplace is quickly catching up to its rival at Apple, a new report says. The company today revealed that it now lists three million songs on offer as part of its online music store; while still well short of iTunes, the figure is an increase from the 2.5 million on offer as reported by Zune product manager Matt Jubilirer -- a jump of 20 percent in the space of only four months.

While well behind iTunes, which reached 5 million songs across its library last month, the tally points to a better-than -equal pace of growth for the Microsoft-run store. The Zune Marketplace had started with roughly two million tracks for download upon its launch in mid-November of last year, compared to Apple's then far larger 3.5 million songs during the same period.

Microsoft has yet to provide recent updates to the number of songs sold through the service, however, and claims only that it should sell one million Zune devices by the end of June 2007.