During yesterday's conference call, Apple confirmed that the iTunes Music Store still has "over 70% market share of legal downloads in the U.S." and is therefore so far ahead of the competition that Napster, Sony, and the rest aren't so much eating Apple's dust as they are eating the fossilized remains of that dust when they finally catch up to where it once floated free in Apple's wake hundreds of millions of years earlier. And yet you have to admire these competitors, because they're always on the lookout for new ways to try to wrest the crown from Apple's grasp. After all, if we didn't appreciate the quixotic attempt to unseat an established rival with a seemingly insurmountable market share lead, would we be Mac users in the first place?

On that note, look what faithful viewer gbois dug up from BBC News: it seems that OD2, the pre-iTMS digital download leader in Europe for something like four years running, is hoping to attract a little attention with its claims of soon having the largest catalog of any downloadable music vendor. OD2, you no doubt recall, recently sold itself to Loudeye when it saw the writing on the wall (and that writing said "iTMS IS KICKING YOUR HINDER SO HARD YOU'RE FEELING IT THREE FEET IN FRONT OF YOU"), but that evidently hasn't made it stop fighting; reportedly the service plans to add "nearly one million new tracks" to boost its song list to about 1,350,000 and "become the biggest Internet music service in the world."

Well, biggest in terms of catalog size, anyway, because it sure won't be the biggest with regard to sales. Still, if the company can deliver on its promise (and we don't see why it couldn't, since it's apparently just talking about merging in Loudeye's songs), OD2's catalog will indeed be almost twice as big as Apple's is right now. And since spillover from the iTMS and Napster hype actually pushed OD2's sales up by 22-28% during those rival services' launch weeks, even if it may be futile to try to push Apple out of first place, OD2 can at least increase its sales with respect to what they are now and maybe carve out a nice comfortable niche for itself. After all, Apple doesn't need to topple Dell or Microsoft to turn a tidy profit; the music download business is far less forgiving, no doubt, but we have to think there's at least a slim chance of happy survival.

See? We have a heart; we wouldn't wish a humiliating slide into oblivion on anybody. (Well, except for maybe BuyMusic.com, but that's already happened, so we're in the clear, karmically speaking). As for when OD2's planned catalog expansion might take place, no time frame is given other than "later this year," so it'll be interesting to see how (or if) Apple reacts to the news. Reports of an imminent contract between Apple and Europe's independent labels imply that a fresh infusion of indie music into Euro iTMS isn't too far off, but somehow we doubt that'll account for the 650,000 songs Apple needs to add if it wants to stay ahead of OD2.

Say, wasn't the Grateful Dead supposed to be adding every song from every single show it ever played to the iTMS? Because, you know, that'd probably take care of it right there...