Beatles on iTunes: Still selling

The arrival of Beatlesband on iTunes was either a bit of a damp squib - alright sales, but nothing like the digital rush predicted these last ten years.

Since the launch, the tracks have been ticking along:

iTunes representatives say more than 5 million tracks and more than 1 million albums by the Fab Four have been sold worldwide. As Entertainment Weekly notes, 2 million of those songs and 450,000 albums sold in the first week alone.

The post-launch sales figures actually sound a bit more impressive - there was no massive burst of interest, but trickling along selling tens of thousands a week would have been a great achievement.

Except, of course, these sales have been driven by a massive marketing campaign - both within iTunes, where The Beatles are still being pushed every day; there was an even more expensive real world campaign which included iTunes and Beatles branded shop displays on both sides of the Atlantic; there were also press and TV ads running long after the initial launch.

There's an understandable upside for Apple (the computer company) here, in that using Beatles to get people into the iTunes universe is a good investment. But it'd be interesting to know if the Beatles on iTunes have yet started to show a profit for the company.