Hey, everybody, it's time to check in once again with the official iTunes Music Store download count-- at least, Apple says it is, and who are we to argue? The last time we heard any official sort of tally was back in mid-December, when Apple revealed that it had sold 25 million songs, at a then-current rate of "almost 1.5 million songs per week." Well, the snowball just keeps getting bigger and crushing more idyllic mountainside villages, because today's press release reveals that the iTMS recently sold its 50 millionth song ("The Path of Thorns" by Sarah McLachlan-- gee, suppose they'd have told us which song it was if it had been, say, "Suck My Left One" by Bikini Kill? Just wondering) and the download rate is now a whopping 2.5 million songs per week. That comes out to 130 million songs per year, assuming the traffic holds steady-- and all indications so far are that it's increasing.

As per union regulations, the press release includes a Nifty Executive Quote™, and we're lucky enough that this time around it comes from none other than Steve Jobs: "With over 50 million songs already downloaded and an additional 2.5 million songs being downloaded every week, it's increasingly difficult to imagine others ever catching up with iTunes." Translation: "Hey, Napster: we're holding up a finger right now. Guess which one?"

And yet, certain factions of the press are somehow interpreting this news as some sort of admission of failure; faithful viewer Julian Clark tipped us off to a BBC NEWS article whose spin on the press release is "Apple misses music sales target," noting that 50 million songs is nowhere near the 100 million Steve Jobs wanted to sell in the iTMS's first year. There are couple of things wrong with the Beeb's reporting, though; first of all, Apple hasn't missed anything yet, since, as the BBC readily admits, Steve's 100 million goal has a target date of April 28th. Not that we expect Apple to sell another 50 million songs in the next six weeks, of course, but it still seems a little early to announce that Apple has already missed its target, unless the byline on that article credits "Doctor Who."

Of course, it's the second point we need to make that really casts the BBC NEWS report in a crappy light: Apple's reported 50 million songs sold is "not including songs redeemed from the currently-running Pepsi iTunes promotion," and the original 100 million song goal did include Pepsi downloads. Indeed, the promotion was even introduced specifically as a way for Apple to reach that goal. Check it out, the QuickTime version of the Music Event is still online; scrub to 44:33 to hear Steve say "We want to sell 100 million songs by April 28th, 2004. That's a really high bar. How in the heck are we gonna do it? Well, we got a few ideas. First of all, our Mac customers are going to purchase about 30 million songs the first year. We're almost halfway there, we're running at an over 30 million song a year rate right now, we're pretty confident of this. The next thing we're doing, though, is we're taking it to Windows. Right? This is a very large market, we've got the best product out there by far, this is gonna help a lot. But what if that's not enough? What else should we do?"

Nothing too damning yet, right? But that just sets the stage. Scrub forward to 50:12 (unless you want to listen to all the stuff about the AOL tie-in, of course) to hear him talk about the Pepsi promo; you'll hear him say this: "So, going to Windows, 25 million AOL users, making it really easy for them, but what if that still doesn't get us to 100 million songs? What are we gonna do? Well, we're gonna do a third thing. We're gonna give away 100 million songs. You heard me right. And to do this, we are partnering with Pepsi. It's really cool." So there you have it, folks: BBC NEWS was wrong, wrong, wrong-- and frankly, we kind of resent being forced into our totally unsupported Investigative Journalism mode to prove it. (Every time we do that we wind up with a headache and a painful burning sensation.)

Now that that's all out in the open, assuming that iTMS sales proceed at current levels and 35% of the winning iTunes bottlecaps are redeemed (sounds pretty likely with all the tilters out there-- go get 'em, folks!), Apple shouldn't have much trouble clearing that "really high bar." Oh, but since we are in Investigative Journalism mode, we get to do that cool newsanchor thing and say "And this just in": an anonymous faithful viewer now informs us that CNET screwed up on this, too-- and MacDailyNews did the same legwork we did to prove them wrong. Oh, terrific. So now we've got a migraine and, um... "micturition troubles" for nothing? Remind us to leave the digging to the real journalists next time. We're just not built for this sort of thing.