European iTunes Stores Sell 800,000 Tracks in One Week

There was a distinct lack of surprised faces yesterday at Apple’s announcement that their European iTunes stores sold a total of 800,000 tracks in their first week of operation.

The most popular store was the UK version, accounting for 450,000 tracks out of the total. In the week that OD2 was acquired by Loudeye, iTunes sold 16 times more tracks than its closest competitor. Best cash that cheque as fast as you can, Peter. No figures are available from Napster.

One ploy for attracting sales was to release the first new track for 13 years from the Pixies exclusively on iTunes, though I’d like to see how much direct impact this had as there can’t be that many Pixies fans left still alive.

iTunes

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?