Who says the music business is finished?
Not Apple, which recently confirmed that its wildly successful iTunes Store has sold over 25 billion songs since first opening its virtual doors in 2001.
The 25 billionth song, “Monkey Drums” (Goksel Vancin Remix) by Chase Buch, was purchased by one Phillip Lüpke from Germany, who was awarded a €10,000 ($13,525) iTunes Gift Card.
“Averaging over 15,000 songs downloaded per minute, the iTunes Store connects music fans with their favorite artists, including global sensations like Adele and Coldplay and new artists like The Lumineers, on a scale we never imagined possible,” said Apple exec Eddy Cue.
The iTunes Store is currently ranked the world’s most popular music storefront, with an expansive catalogue of over 26 million songs.
All music on the iTunes Store comes is packaged as iTunes Plus, Apple’s DRM-free format with high-quality 256 kbps AAC encoding.
Plus, iTunes in the Cloud allows users to download previously purchased iTunes music to their devices at no additional cost, while new music purchases can be downloaded automatically across iOS devices.
iTunes 11 – which went live on November 29, 2012 – is the most recent version of the software, which is available for Mac OS X v10.6.8 or later, as well as Windows XP or later.
