Apple has claimed its iTunes service has taken first blood in its battle with the newly relaunched Napster music download site, selling five times as many songs as its rival.
ITunes, which launched in April, has been widely hailed as a success for Apple and proof that if customers are prepared to pay to downlaod music if they are offered an easy to use service with a wide selection of available tracks.
Songs on the service are available for a flat fee of 99 cents each and all five major labels have persuaded the majority of their big artists to license their music for digital download.
The latest figures from the California-based company show consumers purchased 1.5 million songs through iTunes during Napster's first week of operation. It has sold a total of 17 million tracks since launching to great fanfare in April.
Napster, the former scourge of the record industry, was relaunched as a legitimate service last month after software company Roxio bought the bankrupt company. The company had been crippled by its legal fight with the record industry, and Roxio brought in the service's whizzkid founder, Shawn Fanning, as a consultant.
Napster recently said it sold 300,000 songs during its first week of operation following the relaunch on October 29. In its heyday, over 60 million users were logging on to the service to access music for nothing.
The music industry has pointed the finger at internet piracy as one of the major causes of a global slump in sales figures, which have fallen by a fifth in the past two years.
While they succeeded in shutting down the original Napster operation, dozens of other song swapping services such as Kazaa and Gnutella sprang up in its wake. They are proving almost impossible to shut down because of their peer to peer nature, despite a recent flurry of lawsuits against individuals downloading music in the US.
But the success of iTunes has prompted a wave of enthusiasm among music industry executives who hope it may help reinvigorate sales. Several other companies including AOL, Microsoft, Playlouder and Real Networks have also launched their own download services in the wake of the successful Apple launch.
Steve Jobs' Apple is increasingly focusing on music downloads and its personal music device, the iPod, as a means of boosting revenues.
It recently launched a PC version of iTunes, which was previously available for Macintosh users only, and plans to launch the service in Europe once it has negotiated the complex licensing issues, probably in the first quarter of 2004.
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