Simple coincidence, or evidence of spooky psychic phenomena? Just the other day we were thinking to ourselves, "gee, it sure seems like it's been a long time since Apple last issued a press release celebrating an iTunes Music Store sales milestone; surely they're due for one by now"; and what should happen mere days later? Bickety-bam, we get a press release celebrating an iTunes Music Store sales milestone. Clearly we have Real Powers™ and this is the part in the comic book where we would typically vow always to use them for good instead of evil... but, well, let's be honest, here: evil's more fun.

But enough about our nascent plans to enslave mankind by exploiting our apparent mastery of The Force; let's focus on that press release for a minute, because it's a good one. It seems that following the purchase of The Complete U2 by Ryan Alekman of nearby Belchertown, MA (yes, it's a real place-- we have a friend whose grandmother used to burp loudly every time they drove through it), iTMS sales have now crossed the 200 million mark. That strikes us as all kinds of impressive, given that the 150 millionth song was sold only two months ago. Break out the calculator and you'll see that, assuming zero net growth in iTMS sales from now on, Apple's selling at a frankly disgusting rate of 300 million songs per year. Yow. Remember the razzing the company took from the naysayer pundits when it missed its insanely ambitious first-year target of 100 million songs by a whopping 30 percent? Well, we're thinking that this more than makes up for that little shortfall.

Not to mention, of course, that assuming zero growth is somewhat absurd, in light of the fact that iTMS sales have been accelerating at an alarming rate from the very beginning. Faithful viewer Scott Naness is still tracking the average number of songs sold per day between each reported milestone, and we've already seen it climb from 100K to 275K to 340K to 403K to 480K to 581K-- and if you think that's a whole lotta K's, hold onto your A, because in the past two months Apple's average number of songs sold per day skyrocketed to 806,452. (Note that this is still far short of the "million songs per day" that professional Dorkus Malorkus Scott Blum said he thought he could sell when he launched the calamitously ill-fated iTMS competitor formerly known as BuyMusic.com. Man, that guy just keeps looking dumber and dumber.)

Rather than plot the data and force a curve-fit to estimate when the iTMS will reach the million-songs-a-day mark or officially cross into McDonalds territory and put up the "OVER 1 BILLION SOLD" sign, we thought we'd go the math-free route and instead mention that this time, Apple has a secondary motive for its press release: in addition to just gloating shamelessly (not that there's anything wrong with that), it also reminds people that bright green iTunes prepaid cards make terrific holiday gifts, and emailable and printable iTunes gift certificates make "the perfect last minute stocking stuffer." There's nothing like making more money while crowing about being "number one by far," is there?