Apple's music news just keeps on getting better; now they've issued a press release reporting that the iTunes Music Store has officially sold over one million songs in its first week. Furthermore, "over half" of the tracks in the iTMS's entire 200,000-song catalog were downloaded at least once, and more than 50% of the songs sold were purchased as full albums. You want more, you say? Then toss in these fun facts: iTunes 4 has been downloaded over a million times; sales and orders of the new iPods have already topped 130,000; and over 3,200 new songs are slated to pop up in the iTMS sometime today. So are we tired enough to resort to using horrible clichés like "this is music to our ears"? Oh, my yes. Heck, we're tired enough at this point to let Anya finish up the episode on her Magna Doodle.

Well, okay, maybe not.

And yet, somehow we're not too tired to futz around with a calculator. Word got out last week that, at launch, the iTunes Music Store had sold 275,000 songs in the space of just eighteen hours; multiply that out for a whole year and it comes to an annual revenue of $132,495,000. But now we have a slightly more realistic rate to consider: a million songs in a week. A little more math reveals that if sales stick there, the iTMS will pull in $51,480,000. Still not too shabby, right?

There's just one teensy little problem: that's a drastic reduction in sales rate over the course of 6.25 days, and since two points define a line, it's therefore possible to consider the dropoff in sales rate between the first eighteen hours and the end of the first week as a linear function. Our sleep-deprived calculations therefore show that during all of Week 12, the iTunes Music Store will have sold... um... two songs. We could be way off base here, but we're guessing that a buck ninety-eight in gross weekly revenue probably isn't going to prompt any boastful press releases.

But hey, we're not going to let any brain-dead arithmetic spoil the party-- and apparently neither is anyone else, especially the folks on Wall Street. Did you happen to notice what went on with Apple's stock price yesterday? That sucker popped right through the roof, up $1.64 (that's over 11%!) to close at over $16 a share for the first time in probably six months. And it's all thanks to the music. We find it odd that investors couldn't care less when a computer company makes great computers, but suddenly start drooling all over themselves when the same computer company sells a bunch of Christina Aguilera tracks. Go figure.