iTunes Music Store Tops 50 Million Songs Sold -- Apple announced today that the iTunes Music Store had hit its 50 millionth song sale, and was averaging 2.5 million songs sold per week, about half in the form of albums. In an interview this morning, Apple vice president Rob Schoeben said, "The milestones that we're hitting are not just the passage of time," but the store has been ratcheting up with major events, such as adding the Windows iTunes software, Christmas sales, the iPod mini launch, and the Pepsi promotion.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/mar/ 15itunes.html>

Schoeben noted that the band Green Day released an exclusive single on iTunes, which shot to the number one position on the store within a day and stayed in the top three for three weeks. (Pepsi's use of the song in a commercial for the iTunes promotion, which ran during the Super Bowl, no doubt helped spread the word.) Radio stations picked up the song without any other form of the single's release. [GF]

<http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/ads/>
<http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/ wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=5305681& amp;selectedItemId=5305679>