Apple issued a press release this morning announcing that the 5 billionth song has been sold in iTunes.
The press release went on to say that iTunes customers are renting and/or purchasing over 50,000 movies every day, making iTunes the world’s most popular movie store.
The movie information in particular is interesting. 50,000 rentals/purchases a day (I’m going to assume that the majority of those are rentals) is a very impressive jump, and definitely shows that people are interested in digital downloads a format for receiving movies. Most of us here would probably agree that we’ve known that for a very long time, but sometimes you have to prove these things to movie studios and executives, and I certainly hope that almost 20 million downloads this year (which is where they’ll be if they continue at this pace) will be enough to convince them that digital distribution is a viable, and profitable solution.