Apple’s digital media store iTunes, which offers up popular music, podcasts, audiobooks, video and a whole host of other content formats just reached another milestone today, announcing that 10 billion songs have been downloaded through iTunes.
The achievement was reached on the same day as Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs birthday, who by the way turned 55 years of age today. A quick check on the iTunes website today marks the media download achievement with a list of the most popular songs of all time which include such hits as I Gotta Feeling (Black Eyed Peas), Poker Face (Lady GaGa) and Boom Boom Pow (again by the Black Eyed Peas).
In case you are wondering, the 10 billionth download was “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash and the person who downloaded the song was Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Ga. Sulcer for his part received a $10,000 iTunes gift certificate.
iTunes has now been in business for about 7 years now which means that on an annual basis, roughly 1.4 billion legal song downloads occur each year. This by far makes iTunes the largest online music retailer, but more importantly, this number shows consumer interest in the availability of high quality audio files that can be legally downloaded.
