Roughly ten days after Apple’s iTunes Music Store began its “count up” giveaway with the 95,000,000th song sold, the company is poised to pass the 100,000,000 song mark. At approximately Midnight Eastern Standard Time (U.S.), July 12, 2004, Apple flipped the official count up timer to “99,943,896.” At the current rate of sales, Apple will hit the 100 millionth song today, quite likely within the next two hours.
Best of luck to all those entering the grand prize giveaway!
Update: Apple hit the 100,000,000 mark at approximately 1:25AM Eastern Standard Time (U.S.). (The final three updates to Apple’s page were 99,992,422, then 100,014,607, then a static 100,000,000 banner.) Congratulations to Apple on this major milestone in legal music downloading!
Update 2: Preliminary sales figures suggest that roughly 40,000 songs (estimated value $39,600) were sold in just the final ten minutes before the 100,000,000 mark was reached.
By comparison, the grand prize of a 17” PowerBook laptop computer, 40GB iPod and 10,000 song iTunes Gift Certificate were valued at approximately $13,200 – a very smart promotional move for Apple. To see the progression of sales from 94,679,227 songs to over 100,000,000, click on the link to Kurt Hoffmann’s table below.