Okay, it's now been a solid week since Apple announced that its iTunes Music Store had racked up sales of a million songs in its first week of operation, and we admit it: we're starting to get a little creeped out, here. Apple's stock is still edging upwards at its highest levels since last July, and word of the service is still plastered all over the media-- with the overall content of such stories chock full of praisey goodness. We could be wrong, here, but we don't recall any other Apple announcement yielding so much positive mainstream attention since... well, since the original iMac. And the skepticism factor in the iMac coverage was much higher, too.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," you say, "the iTMS is a colossal success blah blah blah, revolutionizes the way we buy music blah blah blah, might get Steve Jobs canonized as the Patron Saint of Boogieing Down blah blah blah. But it's U.S.-only and I hail from [one of several non-U.S. nations including but not at all limited to Australia, Thailand, Ecuador, Denmark, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, and Azerbaijan]-- so when am I going to get a taste of all this legitimately-downloadable aural bliss?" Well, hang in there, Short Round; MacRumors hints that Apple's plans to take its music service global may already be hurtling along behind the scenes. One of their sources expects that the Canadian version of iTMS-- presumably identical to the U.S. one, except it's cleaner. has better health care, and calls ham "bacon"-- is due to surface "on the order of weeks." Something to cheer aboot, eh?

As for countries flung a bit farther afield, don't fret; iTMS is coming... just not as quickly. A MacWorld UK article refers to a piece in Music Week which quotes Apple Europe veep Pascal Cagni as saying that "as head of Europe, I have only one interest, which is to launch [iTMS] in Europe." Wow, that just shows you how out of touch we are when it comes to world politics-- we had no idea that the head of all of Europe was an Apple employee! With that kind of power, he should gave no trouble hammering out licensing deals with the record companies; talks that are "set to begin in earnest." So, Europeans, be patient and put your faith in your sovereign King Cagni; you'll be downloading songs by the Euro in no time.

So, Canada first, then Europe, and then... who knows? But we think it's a pretty safe bet that now that Apple has the U.S. service's remarkable success as a carrot on a stick, overseas record companies will be happy to license their stuff for Apple's international customers. To keep revenues at reasonable levels during the expansion, we're guessing that Apple will probably aim to roll out the service earliest in countries with the highest concentrations of tech-savvy, music-loving party animals packed within their borders. That means you, Pitcairn Island! Wooo-hooooooo!! Party down!

Speaking of the iTunes Music Store, what's up with the Incredible Shrinking Selection over there these days? Sure, Apple made a big deal about adding 3200 new songs last week, but what the company didn't tell anyone is that several songs have since gone missing. We can only hope that Apple publicly addresses this distressing phenomenon and provides a reasonable explanation before rumors of music-devouring trolls infesting Apple's servers spread to Wall Street and trigger a massive stock price collapse.

We first heard tell of songs evaporating last Thursday, in a PowerPage article claiming that Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey" had mysteriously vanished from the store's list of offerings between the time the author added the song to his shopping cart and the point at which he actually attempted to check out and make his purchase. At the time we assumed it was an isolated store-engine glitch, or maybe someone reported a problem with the encoded version of that one song and it was subsequently pulled temporarily, and thus we didn't get alarmed. Heck, for all we knew, said incident never really happened at all, and the anonymous PowerPage author was simply coming down off a bad acid trip. (Psychedelic drug use among anonymous authors is at an all-time high. Just say no, kiddies.)

But then we noticed that a MacInTouch reader confirmed that other Van Morrison songs had gone bye-bye. Meanwhile, MacMinute reported that all Radiohead songs had also since disappeared, including the album OK Computer, which a MacMinute reader had previously purchased from the store, and suddenly the music-devouring troll scenario started to look a little more plausible. Well, don't worry, folks; our own sources report that this is not the work of trolls, not is it the result of some bizarre anti-Van-Morrison-and-Radiohead vendetta undertaken by His Steveness during a particularly intense mercurial streak. The real reason these tracks are no longer available at the iTMS is simply because they're sold out.

Yup, it seems that Apple grossly underestimated the demand for songs by these two artists and stocked far fewer copies than it probably should have; as a result, inventory was depleted way more quickly than anticipated, and those sold-out tracks will remain unavailable until a new shipment arrives. Don't fret, though-- we're told that the record companies have Van Morrison and Radiohead chained up in a studio somewhere, cranking out copy after copy of the depleted songs, which will soon be freighted to Apple and placed back on the shelves at the iTunes Music Warehouse. Oh, the pains of poor inventory management...

Regular viewers are already all too aware that if there's any technology down here at the AtAT compound that we use even half as often as our Macs, it's our TiVo-- and, in fact, if we were forced at gunpoint to choose between living without one or the other, we'd probably opt for a quick and painless death as a far more preferable third option. Which is, of course, why we're all agog over a Business 2.0 article recently pointed out to us by faithful viewer Bob, in which the author claims that an Apple buyout of TiVo would be a match made in digital heaven.

Note that the article doesn't claim that an Apple-TiVo merger is actually in the works, or even in the kicking-around phase; much to the disappointment of jump-to-conclusions types like faithful viewer SebiMeyer (and, of course, ourselves), once you actually read the piece, it's simply the Business 2.0 equivalent of a Marvel "What If...?" comic. But it's a nifty scenario for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that TiVo users are at least as fanatically devoted as Mac users, and tying the two technologies to the same parent company could cross-pollinate platform loyalty to hitherto unprecedented heights.

Here's the main thrust of the proposal: TiVo in reviled by the entertainment industry, who sees it as a threat to advertising revenues (to those guys, fast-forwarding through commercials is a sin second only to rebroadcasting Major League Baseball games without express written consent) and possibly as a future method for the easy swapping of recorded shows on the 'net. (TiVo doesn't officially allow the transfer of TiVo-recorded content, but people have worked around that.) Apple, on the other hand, seems to have a solid relationship with the same industry, what with producing all that video-editing software and managing to accomplish what no one else ever has: an industry-endorsed digital music store that doesn't totally suck. So who better to turn TiVo into a best-of-breed, industry-blessed personal video system than Uncle Steve?

We're sort of torn on the issue, actually, since we're perfectly happy with how TiVo's doing on its own. But if Business 2.0 is right and TiVo faces extinction at the hands of the entertainment industry (who recently sued the makers of the commercial-skipping, show-trading TiVo-rival ReplayTV into bankruptcy), who better to out-TiVo TiVo than Apple? Food for thought. And even if you have no interest in TiVo whatsoever, it's worth checking out the article just to see the words "Apple" and "beleaguered" appear in the same piece wherein the latter term isn't describing the former. History has been made!