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]