Okay, we figure it's still way too soon to decide for sure whether or not the iTunes Music Store is a hit, but the early stats sure seem to indicate that it's heading to number one with a bullet. According to Billboard, Apple's new music service spat out some 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours online. And we're not talking 30-second free previews, people; at 99 cents per song, that there represents something like $272,000 racked up in three-quarters of a day. Sounds like an awful lot, doesn't it?

Well, don't get too excited just yet; we're a little ashamed to admit it, but we here at AtAT may have inadvertently inflated those sales numbers just a wee bit beyond "normal" levels. Basically, we got so excited about the whole instant gratification thing that when we were browsing around through the iTunes Music Store earlier this week, we sort of bought, um, one of everything. Sorry about that. But if it makes you feel any better, we are just going to feel awful when the Visa bill shows up.

Regardless, the early numbers definitely indicate that people (well, Mac users, at least) are perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price to download high-quality music as long as it's got relatively lax restrictions on what they can do with it. And don't forget that the current universe of potential iTunes Music Store customers is pretty darn tiny. Mac users are a minuscule subset of the total pool of computer users (albeit the smart, charming, and good-looking subset), and the number of Mac users in the U.S. (iTMS is U.S.-only so far) running Mac OS X 10.1.5 or higher (required for iTunes 4) is even smaller still. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out what's likely to happen when Apple introduces the service outside U.S. borders and to all those poor slobs out there running Windows.

Aw, heck, it's Friday; let's do a teensy bit of math just for giggles. Figure first of all that the iTunes Music Store was maybe ten times more active at its launch than it will be on an average day once the hype starts to die down. That's 27,500 songs sold in 18 hours, or 36,667 a day, just among Mac users. Now, let's conservatively estimate that Windows support will increase Apple's customer base, say, eightfold, and international support will double it. That comes out to roughly 586,000 songs sold per day, even ignoring any boost that might come as Apple extends the store's catalog beyond the stuff offered by the major labels. Word on the street is that Apple gets about 35 cents per song it sells; even after siphoning off bandwidth and support costs, we're talking about probably at least a cool million bucks in pure profit for Apple each and every week. Yowza!

All of which will come in handy if we can persuade the company to help us pay that Visa bill. Say, can we maybe sue because iTMS makes impulse buys too easy?...