Given our "oh yeah, we also still have to do that whole AtAT thing" broadcast schedule, you've no doubt already heard by now, but as faithful viewer foolsdragon first notified us mere minutes after the goal was reached, Apple sold its 100 millionth song in the wee hours of Monday morning. Please note that right after the giveaway was launched, on Friday, July 2nd at 2:24 AM EDT we guessed the 100 million mark was "probably no more than maybe ten days away." Note also that, according to Apple's winners list, the hundred millionth song was downloaded on Sunday, July 11th at 10:21 PM PDT-- which is Monday, July 12th at 1:21 AM EDT, meaning that we were only 57 minutes off.

Ooooooo. This is the part where you deduce that we have real powers, bow before our Astonishing Predictive Abilities™, and offer to pay us huge wads of cash for our lottery number picks (with no guarantee of accuracy explicit or implied).

Anyway, the giveaway is over, and instead of that big, friendly countdown/countup/whatever that we've gotten so used to seeing for the past week or so, Apple's home page now proudly proclaims that "100 million songs have been legally downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. A major milestone for online music." And for some reason, there's a suffusion of hot pink. (Celebratory hot pink, we assume.) While Apple had originally hoped to be here two and a half months ago, that was before Pepsi botched its yellow cap promotion, and the Euro iTMS took much longer to get off the ground than anyone had expected. Given those constraints, we figure Apple has plenty reason to be proud.

Speaking of Europe, though, does anyone else find it a bit suspicious that every single winner listed on Apple's site is from the U.S.? Not that we'd expect a 2:1 ratio of Germans, or anything, but given the reported download numbers we'd have thought there'd be at least one or two non-Yanks mixed in among the home team, but no. Then again, Apple only lists 23 winners right now out of 50, so maybe there's some weird legal reason why it can't post the names of non-U.S. winners or something. See? That's us; always willing to believe the best about somebody.

Meanwhile, none of the winners' names looks familiar, and no AtAT viewers have come forward to boast of their victory, so we have to assume you all failed as miserably as we did. Well, maybe not that miserably; faithful viewer Jonathan Claydon came the closest we've seen-- witness the timestamps on the downloads of his Guster album (in Central time). He missed the jackpot by mere seconds. And it's a shame on a number of levels, because not only would we like to have seen an AtAT viewer walk away with the Big Piñata, but we'd also much prefer for the 100 millionth song to have been Guster's "Homecoming King" instead of, as the Apple press release states, "Somersault (Dangermouse remix)" by Zero 7-- but that's just us rooting for the hometown heroes, so don't mind us.

Needless to say, the AtAT staff didn't win squat, but we aren't bitter or anything. This may sound like sour grapes, here, but we have to say, we're actually partly relieved that we didn't win the grand prize. While we'd never spit at a free PowerBook or turn up our noses at a new iPod (our original first-gen models look a lot bigger than they did two and a half years ago, for some reason, and being constrained to a thousandish songs in this day and age is starting to feel like three days in The Box without food or water), that gift certificate is problematic.

See, Mr. Britten is going to have to pay the taxes on the total cash value of this prize pack, which means he's probably going to have to shell out, what, maybe three grand on the $9,900 worth of free music he won? Sure, he's getting a great price, but more or less, he's basically being forced to spend $3,000 of his own money on music, and we doubt that's the sort of thing most people budget for. Besides, is anyone's musical taste both mainstream and eclectic enough to want 10,000 songs from the iTMS catalog?

Oh, all right, fine, we're jealous. Bite us.