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Lady Gaga's new single "Born This Way" has racked up more than 1 million downloads in five days, Apple said on Friday.

That makes the single the fastest-selling single ever on Apple's iTunes store worldwide.

How much pent up demand was there for Beatles music in some sort of downloadable format? A lot, appearently, as Apple has said that since November 16, when they were first released to the world on iTunes, 5 million tracks have been downloaded worldwide.

Illegal downloading is only part of a wider shift in how fans consume music. No one really wants an album anymore; they want the single they heard on the radio; they want track four that played at the end of last night’s episode of Mad Men or The Office.

And for 99 cents they can have it, if they want to pay iTunes or Amazon for the convenience.

The bad news for Amazon.com from this report is that Apple's iTunes service still owns a huge majority of the online music market, at 66.2 percent.

The good news is that Amazon MP3 has managed to grab double digit market share, at 13.3 percent.

The option of buying and creating ringtones has been removed from iTunes 10.

One day after Apple's Sept. 1st even, and one day after iTunes 10 with the Ping social music network released, the question is, what happened to Facebook?

After all, Facebook was mentioned in the event as a way to "find friends" . However, it's not a working part of Ping.

Don't expect to see the Fab Four in the iTunes store, or in any other online store, anytime soon.

Google is reportedly planning a music service that could compete with Apple's iTunes and other digital music services.

Google's service may debut this year as a search engine tie-in and move to subscriptions next year. A Google music service would strengthen its Android mobile platform...

Google is surely pushing Apple with its Android moves. Not only does Froyo sound like something that will push iPhone OS 4, it announced an acquisition on at Google I/O on Thursday that will allow them to build a desktop app that will stream your music over-the-air.