Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco's Moscone West expo center promptly at 10:00 AM Wednesday morning, to thunderous applause from the crowd.

"Today we're here to talk about music," Jobs said.

"We've distributed 600 million copies of iTunes so far, and customers have bought and downloaded over 3 billion songs from iTunes. iTunes is the number one online music store in every single one of the 22 countries it operates in," he explained. "We started with just 200,000 songs and we have over 6 million songs in every single one of those stores."

Jobs told the audience that the iTunes Store -- now the number three music retailer in the U.S. behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy, carries over 550 television shows and has sold 95 million TV shows to date. The service features links to over 125,000 podcasts, with more than 25,000 of them featuring video.

"This last stat I want to share with you blew my mind. In the US, of all the music releases in 2006, 32 percent were digital only releases," said Jobs. "They were not released on a CD. Wow. Look how far we've come: A third of the music released in this country was not on a CD. So that gives you a feeling for how far we've coming in the last 5 years in the digital music revolution."

Jobs revealed that Apple plans to release a new version of iTunes on Wednesday evening that will support the products that are being announced Wednesday -- the biggest new feature in iTunes will be ringtone support for the iPhone.

"We're going to do ringrtones in our own special way," explained Jobs. "And, of course, these are for the iPhone. And what we want is rather than having someone make ringtones for us, we're going to make a custom ringtone maker. We're going to build it into iTunes, and you can make ringtons from many songs available on iTunes including some songs you've already purchased."

Jobs compared iTunes ringtones to the competition, which cost up to US$2.49. "Our ringtones, make 'em yourself, you pay another 99 cents to make the ringtone," he said."

Jobs demonstrated how the new feature works using Aretha Franklin's classic soul number "Respect." All of the songs on the iTunes Store that are "ringtonable" will feature a bell icon column in the music list. You click on the bell, the ringtone maker pops up, and you can click and drag to find the part of the song you want to use as a ringtone. iTunes creates a new file in the ringtone folder, and a new tab in Tunes then lets you decide what to sync to your iPhone.

Jobs played "Give peace a chance," and then added, "That's [for] when NBC calls," referring to Apple's recent dispute with the TV network, which said it will end its partnership to publish shows on the iTunes Store in December.

iPod news

Jobs said that Apple has sold 110 million iPods to date. "The place

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