August 10, 2004: iTunes Hits Million Song Catalogue Mark

When Apple first released iTunes at the 2001 MacWorld San Francisco people saw the program as both a useful addition to the Mac software library and an admission that Apple felt it had missed the boat on the music swapping revolution.

When the iPod came out later in 2001 and worked seamlessly with iTunes some suspected Apple had something more up their sleeve. These suspicions were confirmed when iTunes morphed from just a convenient way of managing your music collection to an online store for purchasing protected songs in April of 2003.

Many were initially skeptical, why buy songs for $0.99 when you could download them for free? The skeptics were shocked when the iTunes Music Store rapidly became a major hit. The success of iTunes was noticed by people wishing to sell music via the distribution system and on August 10, 2004 Apple announced that their online catalogue of music had swelled to over a million tracks.

Source: Apple