Apple Computer announced on Monday (5/5) that its new iTunes music store sold more than one million downloadable song files during its first week of business, far surpassing the company's expectations.

"In less than one week we've broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. The company unveiled the new service--which allows Apple-computer users to purchase individual songs for 99 cents, as well as entire albums, most for about $9.99--on April 28. It is the first online music service with the participation of all five of the major record labels: Sony Music, Universal Music Group, BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI.

"Our internal measure of success was having the iTunes Music Store sell one million songs in the first month," Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris said in a statement. "To do this in one week is an over-the-top success."

"Hitting one million songs in less than a week was totally unexpected," added Warner Music Group chairman and CEO Roger Ames. "Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the Internet."

The praise comes as the major record labels continue to battle against the proliferation of online file-swapping of copyrighted music. After a lengthy court battle, the labels successfully killed pioneering file-sharing service Napster in 2001, but many decentralized peer-to-peer programs have sprung up in its wake, which led some observers to question whether a paid service such as the iTunes Music Store could successfully compete against the unsanctioned--and free--online sources of music.

Apple said that more than half of the 200,000 songs initially offered for sale via iTunes Music Store were purchased at least once, and that more than half of the one million songs sold were purchased as part of a complete album, thus "dispelling concerns that selling music on a per-track basis will destroy album sales."

Apple's iTunes Music Store is currently available only to users of Apple's Macintosh operating system and the Mac-only iTunes 4 software. The company is expected to release a Windows version of the music-store software some time this year.

On Tuesday (5/6), the iTunes Music Store will add more than 3,200 new tracks to its inventory, including new album releases from Jack Johnson, Andrea Bocelli and Fleetwood Mac, as well as pre-release tracks from upcoming albums by David Sanborn, the RH Factor, John Scofield, Jesse Harris and Liz Wright.

The store also will add new featured artist pages for Coldplay--including an exclusive track and music video--and Alanis Morissette.

Apple also announced that, during the past week, it received orders for more than 110,000 of its new third-generation iPod digital-music players, which the company unveiled simultaneously with the iTunes Music Store.