In a press release issued earlier today, Apple announced that the iTunes Music Store is now the second-largest music retailer in the country.

This isn't entirely surprising -- pretty much everyone was shocked back in 2005 in a fairly similar manner when it was revealed that iTunes was beating Tower Records. All reports since then have pointed to the rapid growth in digital download sales, albeit not enough to offset the drop in CD sales and save the floundering record industry.

The only brick-and-mortar retailer able to best iTunes was Wal-Mart, which possesses an almost legendary amount of influence in the record industry due to their position as the sole music outlet in many rural markets -- in fact, they were even able to score exclusive distribution rights for the latest Eagles album. Apple has been getting into this territory as well by asking for exclusive tracks in exchange for lucrative placement within the store's user interface. Interestingly enough, Rolling Stone reported a while back that despite all this, Wally World would still like to see CD prices drop -- much to the chagrin of many record labels, I'm sure.

Even if that comes to pass, one has to wonder how long it'll take for Apple to pull into the #1 slot -- remember, the store launched only five years ago, so if you take a step back and view things in macro mode, we're actually witnessing a rather fantastic coup d'etat here. The wild cards here include the ongoing abandoning of DRM -- which has in turn allowed the first strong iTunes competitor ever in the form of the Amazon MP3 Store -- and, to a lesser, extent, the fact that Wal-Mart also runs their own music download store which is also benefiting from the lack of DRM. Still, it's not unreasonable to expect the crown to be handed over to iTunes within a few years, especially when you consider that Wal-Mart has many other more lucrative revenue streams and probably won't really give a damn about keeping up.

By some sheer stroke of luck and/or force of fate, I happened to be present at the closing of the last Tower Records location in the country when the company shut down for good in late 2006 -- the store was gutted to the bone, with everything from signs to chairs to CD racks offered up for sale to the public (I picked up a huge red plastic shopping basket for about two or three bucks myself) and they started playing Don McLean's "American Pie" as they flipped the light switch for the last time ever -- "the day the music died," indeed.

The scary thing to consider in all this is that even though iTunes made headlines when it leapfrogged its way past a store which had been a pillar of music retail for decades, Tower was still within the top 5 or so retailers nationally at the time. Obviously Monkeyclaus wholeheartedly embraces digital music sales in a way that Tower didn't, but it's sobering to realize that being one of the biggest retailers in the country -- even if that was a step or two below Apple -- wasn't enough to save them. This business is trickier than ever, for sure.

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