Talk about getting out while the getting's good. Remember when we told you yesterday that European downloadable music bigwig OD2 had all but fled the market by selling itself to Loudeye? Instead of sticking around to duke it out with the recent flood of song-selling newcomers on OD2's European turf, the company opted to become Loudeye's European division that builds music download sites for other companies-- which was, given the circumstances, a stroke of sheer mercenary brilliance.

See, think of it this way: even if its clients' stores get steamrolled by the competition (which is getter more and more likely every day), OD2 at least still pockets the dough for building and supplying said stores before they go foom; meanwhile, there's the added buffer of Loudeye's overall revenue stream not relying on song sales-- European or otherwise-- alone. (Heck, as faithful viewer Pepe points out, even Apple is apparently a customer of Loudeye's in some capacity.) Overall, merging with Loudeye seems to be a far safer approach than going head-to-head with the likes of Sony, Napster, and Apple to sell songs directly to the consumer.

But since OD2 was the download market leader in Europe, why the retreat, and why so quickly? Well, mostly because the operative word here is "was." As faithful viewer Darcy points out, Apple has just issued a press release reporting the iTunes Music Store's first week of sales in Europe (or, seeing as it's just the UK, France, and Germany so far, "Europe"), and the results are pretty staggering: 800,000 songs sold in a single week. Oh, sure, that may not sound like much when you're used to the iTMS selling as many as 3.3 million songs in the same time period here in the States, but it's not a far cry from the million songs the iTMS sold in its first week after its U.S. debut last year, especially considering the size of the market over there.

Need to put it even further in perspective? Then consider that just two months ago, OD2 was gushing to the press that, in its role as "Europe's biggest legal downloads distributor," it had sold "over one million downloads in the first three months of the year"-- and now Apple has waltzed in and sold 80% of that in about 8% of the time. Indeed, the Stevequote in Apple's press release notes that of those 800,000 songs sold last week, 450,000 of them were purchased in the UK, which was "16 times as many" as those sold by OD2, Apple's "closest competitor." Sixteen times the sell-through of the former market leader in its first week since launch? Now let's hear those pundits say that the iTMS is only the top dog in the U.S. because it was first out the door.

Meanwhile, this whole "16 times OD2" thing implies that Napster got spanked even harder than that; gee, considering how poorly Napster is doing in the U.S. as well, how long do you suppose it'll be before Roxio gets sick of losing money and tries to unload the service on some other sucker, like Greg Brady tried to sell off that lemon of a used car he bought? Attention, gullible media conglomerates: caveat emptor!