Last month marked the first anniversary of Apple's iTunes Music Store. It's been a remarkable year that has taught the industry - and consumers - several things.

Firstly, if you have a good-quality (and quantity) repertoire presented with a slick user-friendly interface, consumers will pay - this is despite the availability of free music sites.

Secondly, the new retail distributors of music may not be existing or familiar long-standing partners. Thirdly, it helps to have a really cool must-have digital player, such as the iPod, as a driver of your service's popularity.

These are the three key elements that drove Apple's iTMS from a starting point of zero to 70m digital download sales in just 12 months. If there was a fourth element that should not be overlooked, it is the behind-the-scenes charm and clout of Apple founder Steve Jobs, which managed to convince the hitherto recalcitrant record industry to finally see sense and free up a few hundred thousand digitised tracks for sale to US consumers.

Jobs' starting point was a service to support his new music player the iPod, but ultimately to bring the sexiness back to the Apple computer brand. His alliance with the music industry has been so successful that Apple is now selling more iPods than computers.

ITMS has been such a success story that it managed to overshadow another successful launch last year in the US. Napster is, of course, a re-launch but with a new owner and legal strategy this time. Roxio, the digital software company that bought the Napster brand, has built it on existing technology from the moderately successful download service, Pressplay.

Now that it's up and running, Napster 2.0 has sold 5m downloads and is expected to bring in $20m (£10.5m) in revenues this year. The key difference between Napster and iTMS is that Napster also offers an all-youcan-eat subscription service for $10 a month on a streaming basis rather than download. Napster argues that consumers who listen to more music via the subscription service are also the biggest downloaders. Meanwhile the next big frontier for both Apple and Napster is Europe, which is easier than it sounds since they're both mired in untangling cross-country European repertoire rights.

This is, of course, good news for European leader OD2, the service backed by veteran rock star Peter Gabriel. The service, which works as a back-end for most of the main European ISPs and portals including MSN, Wanadoo and Tiscali as well as retailers including HMV, recently revealed that it had finally hit the 1m download mark.

This was mainly due to the early success of its OD2's biggest partner Coca-Cola's mycokemusic.com, which launched this year and is already Europe's number one download retail site.