Singles by the Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga were Apple's most downloaded of this year, the computer giant revealed today.

Crazy for Gaga: Lady Gaga is one of iTunes's most popular artists

Kings of Leon's Only By The Night was the Apple iTunes Store's most downloaded album, followed by Lily Allen's It's Not Me, It's You. Oliver Schusser of Apple said: “This has been the biggest ever year for music downloads for us.”

About 8.5 billion songs have been downloaded from the iTunes store since it launched in the US in 2001. It is now believed to control about 80 per cent of the music download market in the UK.

According to the BPI, last year 10.3 million digital albums were sold across the internet, compared with 123.3 million physical albums. This is expected to have risen this year.

Experts today said Apple virtually controlled the singles market. Stuart Dredge of the website Music Ally said: “The singles chart is basically a download chart, and Apple have a huge market share, so this is a great indication of what people are buying. However, for albums we see a lot of artists, such as Susan Boyle, who do very well on CD, but not on download.”

Apple faces competition from subscriber music streaming sites such as Spotify. It recently bought Lala, a US streaming service.