Apple Computer said Monday that its iTunes music store, which opened a week ago, has sold more than 1 million songs at 99 cents each, a figure that record industry executives said topped internal expectations.
More than half the songs were purchased and downloaded as albums, allaying concerns by some that selling music on a per-track basis would hurt album sales, Apple said.
Apple Chairman and Chief Executive Steve Jobs launched the service at an event last week in San Francisco, with musicians such as Seal and some of the heads of the big five record labels in attendance.
The online music service, which has more than 200,000 tracks for sale, is integrated into its iTunes music software program and for now is available only for Macintosh.
A Windows version is due by year’s end, Apple said.
Users can listen to free 30-second previews of any track on the service and search by album, music genre, song title and artist. Users click on a “Buy it” button to download the track into an iTunes folder.
From there, users can compile playlists and transfer them to CDs up to 10 times before they are required the change the order of the playlist. Users can also transfer the tracks to as many of its iPod digital music players as they like and up to three Mac computers.
“Our internal measure of success was having the iTunes Music Store sell 1 million songs in the first month,” said Doug Morris, chief executive of Vivendi’s Universal Music Group.
Apple, which has 3 percent of the worldwide PC market, sold about 250,000 tracks on its first full day of operation last Monday, record industry sources said. Apple announced that today the service will be adding more than 3,200 new tracks.
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