Saturday 15 January 2011

Beatles on iTunes: five million tracks, one million albums sold

How much pent up demand was there for Beatles music in some sort of downloadable format? A lot, appearently, as Apple has said that since November 16, when they were first released to the world on iTunes, 5 million tracks have been downloaded worldwide.

As of Friday, according to The Loop, the Fab Four have also sold 1 million albums. “Abbey Road” is the current best-selling Beatles album in the U.S., and “Here Comes the Sun” is the current best-selling Beatles song.

Sales have certainly slowed since the initial release. In the first week of sales alone, 2 million songs and 450,000 albums were purchased.

Apple has exclusivity over downloadable Beatles content, although the exclusivity ends "sometime" in 2011. The iTunes Beatles collection currently contains 17 albums, with 13 of the remastered. There is also a $149 box set, which includes all of the remastered studio albums, along with a mini documentary, and a video of the The Beatles first U.S concert from 1964 at the Washington Coliseum.