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Apple Launches New iTunes Stores and Starts Offering Video

May 11th, 2005

Apple has launched four new iTunes Music Stores in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland featuring songs from all four major music companies and over 1,000 independent record labels.

“The iTunes Music Store has revolutionized the way we discover and enjoy music, and is now selling more than half a billion songs per year,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Applications. “With iTunes Music Stores now in 19 countries, music fans around the world can enjoy the number one online music service in the world.”

In conjunction with the iTunes Music Store launch in Switzerland, Apple and UBS today announced a promotion to give every Swiss citizen a free song on the iTunes Music Store as part of their new “UBS Generation” and “UBS Campus” packages. UBS is offering song cards for music downloads in all of their branches, which can be used instead of a credit card to purchase tracks from the iTunes Music Store.

At the same time Apple started to ship iTunes 4.8 including new Music Store features and support for transferring contacts and calendars from your computer to your iPod, although you’ll need Mac OS X 10.4 to do so. A new feature that Apple is keeping quiet about, presumably while it runs live user testing, is video. Short promo clips are available to download in the mp4 format and will play on both PCs and Macs. It would seem to be a short leap now for iTunes to offer full length video and to charge for it.

Entry Filed under: Online Music