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.