Itunes gift card

PayPal and iTunes make sweet music together

Apple and PayPal announced today that the US iTunes Music Store will now accept PayPal for purchases of music downloads, audio books and gift certificates. iTunes Music Store purchases can now be funded through PayPal’s virtual wallet, allowing customers to pay in the way they prefer—using a credit card, bank account or stored account balance. As an added incentive to “spin those notes”, PayPal will also give five free songs to the first 500,000 customers to open a new iTunes account in the US using PayPal as their form of payment, prior to March 31, 2005.

Todd Pearson, GM of PayPal’s Merchant services said, “This agreement is a logical extension of the service PayPal has been offering -- it makes sense for us to work with companies like Apple because we offer a convenient, cost-effective and safe online payment system. By working with iTunes, a whole new class of online buyers will be introduced to PayPal, and our existing buyers can use PayPal for more types of transactions.”

The iTunes Music Store features more than one million songs from the major music companies and 600 independent record labels; over 9,000 audio books; gift certificates and exclusive music not found anywhere else online.

When asked about the future of PayPal usage and expansion, Pearson noted, “Right now, PayPal is focused on three key areas of growth: continuing to grow our eBay business, international expansion, and increasing the usage of PayPal among small businesses off of the eBay platform,” but did not specify further sites.

PayPal currently has more than 56 million accounts and is available to users in 45 countries around the world. Apple helped create the digital music revolution with its iPod portable music players and iTunes online music store.

In October, PayPal and digital music provider Napster inked an online payment agreement for its downloadable music. One can only hope that once PayPal is done taking over the hip e-cash in the online music sector, that they turn their attention to building agreements with some of the larger online chocolate purveyors like the Chocolate Trading company.