We've got another iTunes Music Store sales bulletin, and it's about time! Remember back in the iTMS's infancy when Apple announced totals every twenty minutes keeping us all up to date on how many songs it had sold so far? Well, apparently the novelty's worn off, because it's been ages since we've had a proper press release with a sales total. Thankfully, that dry spell has come to an end, as Apple boogies down to celebrate the Big One-Oh... Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh. No, we're not channeling early-'80s Billy Idol or quoting the lyrical genius of Sir Justin Timberlake; we're trying to tell you that the iTMS recently sold its ten millionth song. Unlike "Paradise Hotel" castoffs, here's a mess of zeroes we can really appreciate.

Apple's third press release of the day indicates that the ten millionth song purchased was "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne, and it was bought at 11:34 PM Pacific time last Wednesday. So, uh, who was it? Was it you? C'mon, fess up-- it was you, wasn't it?

Cooooool. Hey, congratulations!

So we'd do the math, but Apple beat us to it: ten million songs sold in just over four months online breaks down to roughly half a million songs per week on average, which means that the sales slowdown after the first big rush of Mac users "kicking the tires" wasn't nearly as bad as we'd feared. You may recall that Apple sold a million songs in its first week, and its second million in the following nine days; settling into a million roughly every fifteen days sounds just spiffy to us, especially since the major labels reportedly had hoped-- not necessarily expected, but hoped-- that the iTMS would sell a million songs in its first month, and now Apple appears to be sustaining a rate twice that zippy. Kudos to Apple for pulling this off. We can't wait to see the numbers once the Windows version ships.

Speaking of Windows, whatever happened to BuyMusic.com? It's still around, apparently, but we're just wondering when we'll see all of its press releases; you know, ones trumpeting its millions of sales and astounding greater-than-30% customer satisfaction rate. Or is it possible that there are no press releases because Scott Blum's ambitious exercise in simultaneous plagiarism, suckification, and insulting that which it copies poorly in the first place simply isn't emptying Windows users' wallets the way Apple copycats always expect them to? We can't help but notice that the BuyMusic $40 million ad blitz vanished from screens so fast you'd think it was Gigli. But we're sure Scott'll keep us posted on the industry-leading success of his little venture any day now...