Today, Apple has another reason to celebrate: iTunes, the digital music store, has crossed another major milestone by selling over three billion songs.

"We'd like to thank all of our customers who have contributed to this incredible milestone," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes.

The previous record of two billion songs was achieved in January this year, which means that iTunes sold close to 1 billion songs in just seven months.

This new milestone is amazing, especially if you consider that Apple needed three years to sell the first billion. iTunes Music Store opened in April 2003 and the one billionth song was purchased in February 2006.

In September 2006 Apple decided to expand iTunes’ catalog by adding TV shows and movies and in April 2007 the company announced that 50 million TV shows and over 1.3 million movies were sold through its digital store.

Also in April 2007 Apple announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history.

Currently, iTunes catalog features five million songs, 550 television shows and 500 movies.

In order to push digital music sales in May this year iTunes introduced a new feature called “Complete MyAlbum” thanks to which the music fans who purchased singles for $.99 a piece are able to get the full album they belong to at a discounted price.

The future looks even brighter for iTunes as a recent survey published by Nielsen SoundScan revealed that a growing number of music fans are downloading their favorite songs rather than buying CDs. 

According to the latest research released by Nielsen SoundScan in the last six month, a 229.8 million albums were sold in the U.S, down by 10 percent compared to the same period of 2006.

During the same period the digital tracks sales increased 49 percent to 417.3 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures.