A strong, but not a blockbuster showing, according to the New York Times
It may not have been a day we’ll never forget, as Apple’s (AAPL) teaser promised, but the launch of the Beatles on iTunes did make a splash.
EMI announced Tuesday that in their first week as digital downloads on iTunes, more than 450,000 Beatles albums and 2 million individual tracks were purchased worldwide.
That’s better than the skeptics predicted, but hardly a Beatles record.
According to the
New York Times
, which crunched the numbers, those 450,000 album downloads — 119,000 in the U.S., according to Billboard.biz — pale compared with last year’s sales of the remastered albums. In September 2009, EMI sold 626,000 CDs in a week in the U.S. alone.
Judging from the iTunes bestseller lists, sales have already peaked. Abbey Road, the top selling Beatles download, reached the No. 7 spot last week. A week later it had dropped to No. 17.
See also:
- Meet The Beatles’ bestsellers
- Behind the Beatles-iTunes deal
- Meet the Beatles
- One more time: The Beatles on iTunes?
[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]
