Veerle's blog

Last week there was much talk about Virgin also launching its own music service and some of the journalists seem to think that Apple has to worry about Richard Branson.

I have serious doubts about that. The company is called Virgin Digital, and is developing its own digital jukebox and online music store with music delivery company MusicNet that will be available by the end of August, the companies said Sunday. Some years ago Richard Brawson also launched his own Coke and thought it would beat Coca Cola from the first spot but as we all know that didn’t happen either.

Let’s get back to Apple and the iTunes Music Store. Apple announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over 50 million songs from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, not including songs redeemed from the currently-running Pepsi iTunes promotion.

According to the Apple press release, iTunes users are now downloading 2.5 million songs per week, which is an annual run rate of 130 million songs per year.

Wow, these figures are amazing and extremely hard to beat. We can only hope that this will be an eye opener for the decision makers here in Europe and that our Music Store is on its way. Maybe there is some hope because sources close to the iTunes Music Store team claim that Apple may be planning to make a significant iTunes service announcement on or around the anniversary of Music store, which launched in the last week of April of 2003. We can dream isn’t it ;-)

In related news, Apple lawyers have shut down the selling of the software for Pocket PC that mimics the iPod. We mentioned this in our post last week. Even the name change from pPod to pBop and the disclaimer wasn’t enough apparently. This was to be expected.