On Thursday, Apple announced the company’s latest achievement: the sales of its iTunes online music store have gone past the five billion mark. It has now confirmed, without the shadow of a doubt, the number one position in the music sales chart.

Online transactions, especially music, but books and videos as well, are growing more and more popular and will probably soon overtake traditional store sales.

iTunes was launched about five years ago and during this time, it has had a phenomenal evolution: more than 50 million customers totalling five billion songs.

A previous announcement made by the company on April 3 said that, with sales of over four billion songs, iTunes had surpassed Wal-Mart.

The store is also doing very well in its movie section (if we don’t compare it to the music one); in the same Thursday statement, it was said that about 50,000 movies are bought or rented each day.

NPD Group numbers for January and February show iTunes as a comfortable leader with music sales, followed by Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Amazon.

iTunes customers can choose out of eight million songs, around 20,000 TV episodes and more than 2,000 films (from companies such as 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment and others).