APPLE CROSSES 50 MILLION MARK ON ITUNES

The 50 million tracks does not include songs given away free through its ongoing promotion with Pepsi. iTunes offers more than 500,000 songs from 300 indies labels in addition to the Big Five. It currently offers exclusive tracks from 150 artists.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said: “Crossing 50 million songs is a major milestone for iTunes and the emerging digital music era. With over 50 million songs already downloaded and an additional 2.5 million songs being downloaded every week, it's increasingly difficult to imagine others ever catching up with iTunes. Just like nobody ever caught up to us in the PC market after we launched the Mac.”

That doesn’t mean it’s all good news for iTunes. A French group that represents rights holders has threatened the company over what it claims are lost royalties on sales of iPods.

In France a fee is assessed on sales of blank CDs, tapes and other hardware, such as portable music players, that can be used to copy music. The money goes to musicians to compensate them for income lost to piracy. The Society of Music Creators, Composers and Publishers, or Sacem, accuses Apple of refusing to pay the levy on sales of the iPod. The French levy and was extended in July 2002 to cover hard disks built into music players, with the size of the tax based on the device’s memory capacity.

The charge on the largest iPod would come to 20 euros ($24.63) each. Sacem estimates that Apple sold 20,000 iPods in France last year, of varying harddrive size.

Sacem has said that unless Apple settles its growing account, the agency that collects the payments “will have no other option than to go immediately to court to make sure that the rights of artists, composers and producers are respected.” Apple has declined to comment on the issue.

Apple is in talks with record labels over the European launch of iTunes.

In America, the launch of iTunes on all HP computers is getting closer, with HP posting a new website for the new service and Apple offering an HP-specific version of iTunes for download. The HP-specific version’s main difference is reportedly that Apple can track that the user is operating the HP version. The HP-branded iPod, expected this summer, has not been unveiled yet.