You know, we're always a teensy bit leery of those immediate post-launch press releases that companies like to trot out in hopes of persuading Wall Street that a particular product or service is a smashing success. You know the ones: "30,000 framistans sold in first six hours of availability!" and the like. The reason they're a little shady is that they're often colored by pent-up consumer demand, and just because people bought 30,000 framistans in the first six hours doesn't mean they'll buy more than, say, twelve and a half during the rest of that week.

Which is why, when it comes to the iTunes Music Store, we took Apple's "million songs sold in one week" press release with a big ol' grain of NaCl. (For the scientifically unschooled, that's the chemical symbol for the element "Nackle.") Of course the store is going to see a lot of traffic during its first week, as everybody and their Mac-using grandmothers give the service a test drive to see if it lives up to the hype. Don't forget, out of those million songs sold during the first week, over a quarter of them were actually purchased within the first 18 hours. So there was a definite tapering off once people had satisfied their need to kick the tires.

But wait, what's this? Apple has just issued another press release, this time revealing that the iTunes Music Store has sold two million songs in its first sixteen days. Well, braid our hair and call us Heidi-- this is actually starting to look sustainable or something! Heck, if you factor out the first-day sales spike, it looks like the iTMS's weekly sales may even be increasing slightly. Roughly a million songs sold each week is definitely nothing to sneeze at, and once Apple extends the service to Windows users as promised, we imagine the numbers are going to skyrocket.

That's the great thing about music: customers can never have too much. How much they've already bought really has little to no bearing on whether or not they want to buy more. And now that Apple has harnessed the evil incarnate known as the 99-Cent One-Click Purchase, impulse buying takes on a whole new meaning. After all, what else are you going to do with a buck nowadays? Sure, with 10-10-220 you can talk to your Aunt Mildred for twenty minutes, but seriously, folks-- wouldn't you really rather rock out to your own copy of "I Can't Drive 55" than spend twenty minutes hearing about her cat's digestive problems?