More than 250m songs have been paid for and downloaded from Apple's iTunes Music Store, the Mac maker boasted today.

The figure amounts to 20m more than the previous total, announced just a few weeks ago. According to Apple, it's selling more than 1.25m songs a day, which means the company will sell over 456m songs this year if consumers continue to buy at that rate.

By our estimation, they will buy at a higher rate going forward. We reckon iTunes will hit 1bn downloads by the end of the year or early 2006.

The news was accompanied by the claim that the store's UK operation now has a catalogue in excess of 800,000 - some 200,000 songs short of Napster UK's tally. Apple's US iTunes store still claims to offer over 1m songs. ®

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