Two months after making their iTunes debut, The Beatles are setting some significant records in the digital music realm.
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 Associated Press reports that the current best-selling Beatles album in the U.S. is Abbey Road, while the top song is “Here Comes the Sun.”
The Beatles’ music finally appeared on iTunes this past November after a decades-long dispute that prevented the catalog from being sold via the music service. Now, all 13 of the band’s remastered studio albums appear on the site, along with the “Past Masters” set and the “Red” (1962-1966) and “Blue” (1967-1970) compilations.
Meanwhile, even though The Beatles’ music is still popular in the form of digital files, the band’s works also continue to thrive in old-school formats. As Consequence of Sound points out, Nielsen SoundScan reports indicate that in 2010, Abbey Road was the best-selling album — on vinyl — for the second year in a row.
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