Jobs: iTunes is no. 1

Apple's chief executive officer Steve Jobs today told eager attendees of the company's special event in San Francisco that the iTunes Store has sold more than 3 billion songs to date, and that iTunes is the number one music store in all 21 countries served by the Cupertino-based company. Apple has distributed 600 million copies of its iTunes software so far, according to Jobs. "We're pretty amazed at this," Jobs said. "We started with just 200,000 songs, but we have over 6 million songs in every single one of those stores. Millions ahead of anyone else. We've become the number three music retailer in the U.S. -- behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy, ahead of Amazon and Target." The iTunes Store has served up more than 95 million TV shows and 125,000 podcasts. "This is amazing material, it's free, and over 25k are video podcasts," Jobs added.

"This last statistic blew my mind: in the U.S. of all the music releases in 2006, 32 percent were digital-only releases. They weren't released on a CD. Live concerts, independents. Look how far we've come. A third of the music released in this country was digital only," Jobs told a wowed audience. "iTunes is clearly leading the way."

by MacNN Staff