Cupertino (CA) - Apple celebrates the first anniversary of its iTunes music download service. With 70 percent market share, iTunes is leading download service, but it missed Steve Jobs' ambitious goal by 30 million downloads.

Apple has a good reason to celebrate the first birthday of its iTunes service. The company opened the eyes of music industry executives that commercial music download services in fact can work: Apple was first to to offer single tracks for a by now standard 99 cents-per-song pricing.

Apple's model is copied by other services around the world and has proven to be successful. According to Apple, more than 70 million songs were purchased over the past twelve months, resulting in a 70 percent market share. Customers are currently downloading 2.7 million downloads per week, theoretically resulting in roughly 140 million downloads per year.

"iTunes has exceeded our wildest expectations during its first year, charting a new direction for the music industry," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "The unbeatable combination of iTunes and the market-leading iPod offers music fans a seamless experience for discovering, buying, managing and enjoying their music anywhere," he said in a prepared statement, at least publicly ignoring the fact that initial goals were not reached.

While Apple continues two improve its download numbers (up from 2.5 million a week early March), the company believed one year ago to convince users to buy 100 million songs in the first year.

Recent studies indicate that services such as iTunes and Roxio's Napster are on the upswing and help to get music download figures up again. But it is no secret that Apple has a long way to go to further improve the business model of iTunes to convince the majority of music downloaders to switch. According to Nielsen Netratings, Kazaa still counts about 15.9 million users, Apple's iTunes user base is estimated by Pew Internet & American Life at 2.3 million.