iToday was the 1 year birthday of the iTunes Music Store. To celebrate, Apple hosted a conference call for industry analysts and the media, to talk about how the store is doing…

All in all… I’d have to say the store is doing pretty good. The hoped for goal of 100 million songs downloaded in the first year, didn’t quite happen (apparently, no-one drinks Pepsi…that contest didn’t result in as high a number of redeemed songs as expected… not that I can blame anyone.. I don’t drink Pepsi either…—- on that note, if you still have any unredeemed caps, you’ve got a little more then 48 hours to redeem ’em)

Here’s the numbers:

more than 70 million songs downloaded in the past year.

70% market share (Number 1) of legal downloads for both singles and albums

Listeners are buying songs at the rate of 2.7 MILLION songs per week – on track for about 140 million songs in the next year.

Over 700,000 songs from the big 5 labels, and over 450 independent labels.

As if that wasn’t enough…. As a birthday present to the listeners.. Apple will be giving away free tracks each week – an easy way to increase your library. The current track is ‘My Hero’ by the Foo Fighters… but there is a note on one of the iTunes web pages that states there will be a new track on 4/29.

Also today:

iTunes 4.5 – Lossless encoding, convert WMA to AAC, Publish your playlist to the iTMS, Print CD inserts, Party Shuffle, purchased music now authorizable on 5 machines instead of 3, watch movie trailers via iTunes —– I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.. I’ll let you know after I play around a bit.

Quicktime 6.5.1 — Goes with iTunes 4.5 – Lossless encoding is the biggie here.

iMovie 4.0.1 – Performance improvements for large projects

iPod update – updated all iPods to allow playback of lossless encoded music.