Today, Apple announced that they are the #2 music retailer in the U.S. behind only Wal-Mart via the iTunes store. This is quite the feat, but it also demonstrates the future of media consumption. CD sales have been declining for years, but we're still listening to music.

What does this mean for the American family?

First of all, don't buy a fancy CD player for your home or portable stereo. In a few years, it'll have a nice place next to your phonograph turntable and HD-DVD player, and already, it's a thing of the past. You're better off adding an iPod dock (or auxiliary port cord to connect a portable media player) to your system. We just use an Apple AirPort Express and AirTunes to listen to iTunes via our home stereo, but for the more discerning audiophile, check out the Squeezebox.

But if you want to centralize your home entertainment and do audio and video all from the same place, you'll be looking into one of the many computer-to-TV devices out there, like the AppleTV, the forthcoming Netflix box, or an XBox 360, all of which can handle both audio and video and mainly depend on your interface preferences, and you can even rent movies through these services and save yourself a trip to the video store.

The days of having racks and racks of CD's and DVD's are numbered, soon to be replaced with larger and larger hard drives. Just make sure you have a backup!

Below follows the entire press release:

iTunes Now Number Two Music Retailer in the US
iTunes Customers Top 50 Million
CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Apple(R) today announced that iTunes(R) (http://www.itunes.com/) is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, with an incredible 20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone, and offers the world's largest music catalog of over six million songs from all of the majors and thousands of independent labels.
"We'd like to thank the over 50 million music lovers who have helped the iTunes Store reach this incredible milestone," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes. "We continue to add great new features like iTunes Movie Rentals to give our customers even more reason to love iTunes."
Last month, Apple launched iTunes Movie Rentals featuring movies from all of the major movie studios including 20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Lionsgate and New Line Cinema. Users can rent movies and watch them on their PCs or Macs, all current generation iPods**, iPhone(TM) and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV(R). iTunes Movie Rentals will offer over 1,000 titles by the end of this month, including over 100 titles in stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound which users can rent directly from their widescreen TV using Apple TV.
iTunes 7.6 is available as a free download at http://www.itunes.com/. iTunes Movie Rentals are available in the US only and are $2.99 (US) for library titles and $3.99 (US) for new releases, and high definition versions are priced just one dollar more with library titles at $3.99 (US) and new releases at $4.99 (US). Movie rentals from the iTunes Store for Mac(R) or Windows require iTunes 7.6. iTunes Movie Rentals require a valid credit card with a billing address in the country of purchase.
*Based on data from market research firm the NPD Group's MusicWatch survey that captures consumer reported past week unit purchases and counts one CD representing 12 tracks, excluding wireless transactions. The iTunes Music Store became the second-largest music retailer in the US after Wal-Mart, based on the amount of music sold during 2007.
**Movie rentals work on iPod(R) classic, iPod nano with video and iPod touch.