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Apple to Launch Music Service?
discstickers writes "The San Jose Mercury News is running an article about an Apple music service that might be ready to launch next month. $.99 a song with the ability to burn to CD doesn't sound too bad."
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99 cents a track.
~12 tracks on a disc.
~12 bucks for the music, and you have to provide the bandwith, physical media, and case. oh, and no liner notes.
Thanks, but I'll go to my local indie store, where they have the media, case, and liner notes all for 12 bucks.
That's true. I think a lot of people are downloading for free, because they have the excuse that there isn't a way to get just the songs they want on a CD. Now that there is an option to get CDs for $15, but with 15 songs you DO want on it. It's time to see who is making excuses for their piracy and who really just doesn't like the system.
"I can get them 99c cheaper on KaZaA. ... and that is why it will fail. "
Not if:
a.) The selection's good.
b.) The quality is guaranteed.
c.) The transfers happen quickly.
d.) There's an ability to preview the song.
Believe it or not, the price tag is not the major contributer to using Kazaa. It provides the best service. But it's got plenty of room for somebody with good bandwidth to come in and make a better model of it.
You have to remember, this is the same country where people drive gas-guzzling SUVS, pay $3.50 for a coffee and pay over $1.00 for bottled water. They want quality and service, the cost isn't really that big of issue.
I'd definitely check this out, I like to buy my music. The article talks about how it is kind of an odd decision for the record industry to work with Apple because of their low marketshare. The thing is, a significant number of that ~3% have iPods, and I would think that anyone with an iPod has an obvious interest in digital music, and would be more likely to use a service such as this than other consumers. We'll see what happens...
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won..." ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
It is a viable model but the pricing is still too high. $0.99/track equal $15-20/album when CDs can often be found for $10-12 or even less. I would say services like this will be successful when prices reach $0.25-0.50/song assuming they have a good catalog, high quality files (with minimal, if any, DRM) and the service works well.
Ket's face it. Kazaa is annoying. Sure, you can get free music. But you still have the problems of mislabelled files, low quality rips, disconnects, slow transfers, interrupted transfers, incomplete 'catalogues', scarcity of uncommon material... The list goes on and on. The BIG advantage of a commercial (B2P ?) service is that, unless Akamai goes down, the files are always Right There. It's the classic "you get what you pay for" situation.
An Apple-designed service can be expected to be well-designed, reliable, and cool. If 4 major record labels really do provide content this could take off in a major way. This could materially increase Apple's marketshare. Contrast this with Microsoft's DRM-laden plans and you'll see that there will be a clear choice
My employer pays a lot of ASCAP fees, and we have to support Limewire because we have legitimate needs for rapid access to a vast music library. The #1 question during the iTunes 'rollout' was "can I download MP3s with this ?" That answer is about to change.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I imagine it would be a much higher adoption rate, if it were all this, and the RIAA and record congloms saw $$ coming in.
But in a sense you are right. There will always be those that weren't going to pay for it to begin with.
Someone mentioned one of Apple's good philosophies above.
Kepp the honest people honest by offering incentive such as 5 liscense packs of OS X for only $70 more
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
While I agree that being able to pick song by song would be nice in the short term, I do think it would have some long term consequences that may not be so good.
Imagine some future world where everyone gets their music via these services... you could easily wind up with a situation where every new song is overproduced (and possibly run by one of those 'AI' music-hit detectors mentioned here previously) to try to ensure it is a hit, since any time spent writing/recording it will be 'wasted' if not enough people pay for the song by itself. Right now you have an environment where artists can put some experimental tunes in between the sure-fire hits. Maybe these tracks hit the mark and become huge, maybe they tank, but at least they are trying something different. If everything is per-song I think we'll eventually see even less artist experimentation and artist growth than we do now, and that is scary.
See I have a couple of different reasons why this doesn't hit me as a fair deal from apple. Reason one is that I have an eMusic account, same premise. You pay a monthly $10 fee, and you have unlimited downloads of music off their service (And there is a lot that they offer.). Great place if your into punk music too, Epitaph Records is always releasing titles to eMusic for exclusive downloads.
Why would I pay $1 a track, $15 a cd when I can go to a used Record/CD store, pick-up used copies of the artists I want to hear for about $6-$9 a pop. And lets say that Artist releases 5-6 Songs off said album I got as a used CD, Those with this music service from apple will have to go out, get to the site, log in, find the track, pay for track, wait for confirmation of the payment being recieved, then once that confirm is recieved - download it, and then play it where as all I had to do was find case, open case, remove cd, insert cd, play, enjoy.
Oh and I don't have to worry about falling victim to someone else's idea of "High Quality". Commonly people and services will encode at 128 or 192 to save space on their drives, and if you even remotely concidered yourself an audiophile, such sampling would be really sub-standard to your ears. =)
Besides, I for one am still really leary of any site that wants me to pay for digital downloads, what's really there to stop the RIAA or some of their Brain Washed supportive Artists from coming after members on that service? And what's worse from such acts like in the case of Napster, this time they'll have your Real Name, Real Address, Real Credit Card information, etc where as on Napster you at least had Annoniminity from such worries.
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Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides