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Apple has destroyed its competitors in the race to sell the most music tracks to consumers by racking up 400 million track downloads from its Apple iTunes service since its launch.  

Along with this press release was an announcement by Apple iTunes chief Eddy Cue saying that Apple was selling 500 million music tracks a year. The chief was obviously over excited about Apples results since Apple only passed the 350 millionth track mark last month.

Apple will most likely pass the 500 million mark by June and is predicted will reach its 1 billionth song download by the end of this year. If it does reach its 1 Billionth song by the end of the year it will be a 500 million music track selling service a year. Predictions estimate that the iTunes service will hit its 2 billionth song track sale by April 2006.

Along with this release, Apple also expanded its iTunes online service to other parts of the world including Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland meaning that the iTunes service now covers 19 nations of the world. Though delays are still affecting the launch of its Australian iTunes store as it was meant to launch 2 weeks ago and its Japan service will launch later in the year.

Apple's online iTunes Music Store (ITMS) has sold more than 400m downloads. Tucked away in yesterday's press statement announcing new Nordic local ITMS operations, ITMS chief Eddy Cue said the company is now selling more than 500m songs a year. It passed the 350m mark last month. Since ITMS hasn't sold that amount yet, that may seem a rich claim. However, The Register's own forecast had ITMS passing 400m late this month or early next, so the music store's sales are running slightly ahead of our calculations. We reckon it will pass the 500m mark in June, and sell its billionth song in the November or December. If it does, it will indeed have sold Cue's "half a billion songs" this year. In fact, it will have sold something like 870m songs in calendar 2005 alone. We expect it to pass 2bn in April 2006. Yesterday's addition of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland, takes ITMS' country tally to 19 nations - covering more than 70 per cent of the world's music-buying population, according to Apple. If it can get its Australian and Japanese stores up and running this year - ITMS Australia was on the verge of launching two weeks ago, some reports say - there's no reason why it can't meet that target.