Man, talk about bending over backwards for an analyst; during the earnings conference call on Wednesday evening, Kevin Hunt of Thomas Weisel Partners (that's "WISE-el," not "weasel", we promise) kicked off the Q&A session by asking how many songs the iTunes Music Store had sold to date, and Peter "Really, I Mean It, Stop Calling Me Fred" Oppenheimer only answered that "we'll from time to time release music sales as we cross major milestones." Sounded like a snub, right? Except that, as faithful viewer mrmgraphics points out, Apple went ahead and issued an iTMS song-count press release the very next morning. Clearly they aim to please.

Okay, fine, so it was just a coincidence; after all, Apple's been issuing these things like clockwork every 25 million downloads, so it's not like today's press release breaks startling new ground or anything. Still, Kevin Hunt gets his answer, albeit a day late: thanks to a Ms. Beth Santisteven of Ignacio, Colorado feeding her Lauryn Hill jones by plunking down her 99 cents for "Ex-Factor," the iTMS has now officially sold 150 million songs-- which, incidentally, would constitute a playlist roughly 856 years long but would require a 600 TB iPod (or a couple hundred Xserve RAIDs in your pocket) to tote along with you. (Well, okay, not really, since multiple instances of the same song in a playlist don't require multiple copies of the song on the iPod, but still, you catch our drift.)

So how's Apple doing? Well, back when the iTMS hit the 125 million song mark last month, calendularly obsessed faithful viewer Scott Naness pointed out that the time it's taken Apple to reach each subsequent 25 million song milestone dropped from 231 days to 91 to 73 to 62 to a mere 52 days; this time he notes that the interval has dropped to a new low of just 43 days to rack up 25 million purchased downloads. That breaks down to an average of 581,395 songs per day over the past six weeks, or, as Apple puts it, "more than 4 million songs per week" and "over 200 million songs per year." Assuming the acceleration keeps up, Apple's going to have to move to a bigger milestone interval pretty soon, or else by the time it gets to half a billion songs it'll have to issue a press release every twelve minutes and then sue itself for patent infringement in ColorSync.

All right, yes, that was obscure. But we provided a link, so it's okay.

Anyway, with a current sales rate of over 4 million songs per week and no slowdown in sight, it's not hard to understand why, according to CNET, Apple still held a 70 percent market share for legal downloadable song sales (compared to 11 percent for Napster and 6 percent each for Real, MusicMatch, and Walmart) through the end of July. And the numbers are just going to keep getting prettier, because Apple's not standing still; for example, the same press release briefly confirms that the "pan-EU music store" is coming "soon." So if you're a non-UK non-French non-German European, make sure you start saving your Euros, because you'll be helping to inflate that download count yourself any day now.