Amaya Toman Today's world is mainly dominated by the phenomenon of music streaming services. Users rarely buy music on the Internet anymore, preferring to use apps like Apple Music or Spotify. Years ago, however, it was different. In February 2008, the boom of the iTunes Store service began. Despite the initial embarrassment and doubts, it quickly gained great popularity among users. In today's installment of our series on major events in Apple's history, we look back on the day when the online iTunes Music Store became the second largest seller of music.
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In the second half of February 2008, Apple issued a statement in which it proudly stated that its iTunes Music Store had become the second largest seller of music in the United States less than five years after its launch - at that time it was overtaken by the Wal-Mart chain. In this relatively short period of time, over four billion songs have been sold on iTunes to over fifty million users. It was a huge success for Apple and a confirmation that this company is able to survive in the music market as well. "We'd like to thank the more than fifty million music lovers who have helped the iTunes Store reach this incredible milestone," Eddy Cue, who at the time worked at Apple as vice president of iTunes, said in a press release. Cue further added that Apple plans to include a movie rental service in iTunes. The placement of the iTunes Music Store on the silver rank of the charts of music sellers was reported by The NDP Group, which deals with market research, and which at the time organized a questionnaire called MusicWatch. Since users preferred to purchase individual tracks rather than purchasing entire albums, The NDP Group made the appropriate calculation by always counting twelve individual tracks as one CD.
Check out what iTunes looked like in 2007 and 2008:
The iTunes Music Store was officially launched at the end of April 2003. At that time, people bought music mainly on physical media and downloading music from the Internet was more associated with piracy. But Apple managed to successfully overcome many prejudices of this type with the iTunes Music Store, and people quickly found their way to the new way of acquiring music.
