iTunes Store sells three billion songs, keeps on truckin'

After just over four years, the addition of movies and TV shows, and a name change, Apple today announced that the iTunes Store has sold over three billion songs. With a catalog of over five million songs, 550 TV shows and 500 movies, these sales numbers have also propelled the iTunes Store past Amazon and even Target to become the third largest music retailer in the US.

While this is great news and all, I'm getting a bit bothered by the fact that music is gaining more and more of the bragging rights from Apple lately. TV shows seem to be selling pretty well, but just seeing '500 movies' printed in this press release makes the iTunes Store's selection sound like it's about on par with that crappy rental department at that run-down grocery store up the street. Hollywood typically seems happy to hop on any and every bandwagon that rolls into town, and with the reportedly unprecedented profits that record labels and TV show networks make from digital downloads, it still baffles me as to why the iTunes Store isn't able to give Blockbuster and Netflix a run for their money.

Still, three billion songs sold over the world's most popular (and still most DRM-flexible) digital music store is good news, so I tip my hat to Apple on the success of the little jukebox application that could.