Apple: 5 billion songs served on iTunes

It's an impressive milestone no matter how you slice it, cementing Apple's position as the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S. That said, Apple still lags when it comes to DRM-free music.

In its press release, Apple (justifiably) trumpets the iTunes numbers: over five billion songs sold, with a catalog of more than eight million songs.

Meanwhile, Apple claims that customers are renting and buying more than 50,000 movies a day from iTunes, with over 2,000 movies—and about 350 HD titles—available on the iTunes video store.

That's all well and good, and Apple certainly deserves a tip of the hat for almost single-handedly inventing and popularizing digital music sales.

I just wish iTunes sold more DRM-free music. As of late March, Apple only had 2 million DRM-free songs available on iTunes—and while I'm sure that number has grown since then, a quick look at the Top 100 list on iTunes reveals just 15 DRM-free tracks.

Meanwhile, Amazon is looking more and more attractive thanks to its catalog of 4.5 million (and growing) DRM-free music tracks, while Napster just opened a DRM-free music store packed with six milllion songs.

Indeed, it's telling that there's no mention of DRM-free "iTunes Plus" songs (announced with great fanfare back in April 2007) in Apple's chest-thumping press release.

Macworld posted a thorough story recently looking at why Apple's having such trouble boosting its catalog of DRM-free music; in a nutshell, the big labels are shunting their DRM-free tracks to Apple's competitors, hoping to weaken iTunes' hold on the market.

Well, that strategy might work in the long run, but based on iTunes' dominant market share (Amazon comes in a distant second in terms of digital music sales), music lovers are still flocking to iTunes, DRM-free songs or no.

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Press release