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Apple Introduces iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4, new iPod
The store also offers exclusive music, music videos, and other multimedia, all in the main iTunes window. iTunes 4 will be available now (along with QuickTime 6.2), and the music store will be available today. It is Mac-only now, but will be available for Windows by the end of the year.
As a compromise to help prevent piracy, you must change your playlist every 10 CD burns, and you may share the music with only three other Macs (you may modify the list of computers that the music may be shared with at any time). There was no word on the technology used to handle this DRM.
The iTunes playlist sharing allows sharing of playlists, and the streaming of music from one machine to the other, though copying is not supported ("that would be verboten," Jobs added).
The new iPods will be $299 (10GB), $399 (15GB), and $499 (30GB). The dock holds the iPod upright, and has a line-out. The FireWire port is now on the bottom of the unit, and the buttons have been moved up higher, just below the screen, in a row. The improved screen features a backlight. The new units will be in Apple stores on Friday.
I love singles and think paying $20 for an album with just one good single is silly.
If I owned a mac I would support Apple just to show the RIAA what consumers really want. DRM will not help but more modest pricing.
I do wonder how many record labels are signing up with this service though? They make money ripping people off and this may cut into their profits.
http://saveie6.com/
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Anybody remember this? Seems like he knew exactly what he was talking about.
Also, it will be a major hassle, and then you have all those burnt CDs that you'll use very infrequently, which will be a cost and a pain as well. Which, I suspect, is the point.
sulli
RTFJ.
If I'm confronted by two choices:
1) buy a full CD (on average 12-15 songs per CD) at $10 or more when I really just one this one song,
2) buy this one song I want for a buck
Give me option number 2 any day.
I don't like Rock and/or Roll music, so the download thing doesn't really appeal. I can still go to the library and rip just about any music that interests me. What I can't get there, I can't imagine that the iTunes "Store" will have for me.
It's fairly laughable that many of the folks who complain about the price/crippling of the content are those who would never buy the content anyway. I personally, can't imagine that 80% of any "downloader"'s personal music library would ever be purchased.
I find it just as silly that Apple is crippling the content. There's a very available (albeit illegal) substitute good - one that strikes me as kiltering the economics of this undertaking towards the "failure" side.
That being said, I thought the new iPods had usable feature improvements. They are very expensive, but I think they seem to be feature/form factor competitive.
I thought the "rendevous" software side was somewhat interesting.
BTW - We made it how many posts before the predictable "I can build myself an AMD with Linux and Windows (just for games) for $1.99 and it will outrun a $3,000 Mac"?
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
Or save yourself a disc and use an app like audio hijack to rip the iTunes file as it plays.
Ditto with the networked sharing, you stream to me...I rip as I listen.
Apple DRM, with a nod and a wink to what their customers really want.
With the Apple service, you can share your music with your 3 friends (or their computers, anyway), but it's streaming, not copying. Once they've listened to the song, it's not sitting there on their computer to then share with their friends. If they want to do that, they have to go buy the music themselves.
Unfortunately, they've chose AAC as the "music format of the future" - an unfinalized format with no tagging standard and no good gapless playback support...
A. I should be able to buy the songs I like, without having to buy the whole album.
B. I should be forced to buy the whole album.
Now, let me explain why I dislike both of these...
A. I think this approach will encourage less and less thought for artists. Everything would be "hit" driven, much like it is today. The days of "good albums" would be gone, it would all be song driven. Sometimes I find some of my favorite songs aren't the hits played 1000000 times on the radio. I like discovering other tracks. Not all goods songs are the popular ones. Artists would be less inclined to take risks, or put any thought into the layout of the album.
B. I may not want to buy the whole album. I have been burned many times in the past. I have heard a good song, bought the album, and it sucked ass. In that event, the good song was just an ad to get me to buy the whole album. I'll bet a lot of albums have been sold on this principle. Sometimes groups just get lucky with one song. For older music, I think the individual songs should be made available on a per-song basis. After 2 years (and some could argue even one) the album sales basically drop to nothing. In that case, release the individual songs, so people can make compilation CDs or whatever they want. At that point, the album is effectively dead anyway, you might as well reap the benefits of the hit songs.
But like I said, I bounce back and forth between these ideas. You might think that it doesn't matter what I want, that the RIAA will decide what I want. But I am just one of many. They could really make the music industry take off again, where everyone is really into music. Hell, the market is THERE, they just don't see it. I haven't bought a new CD for at least 2 years, simply because nothing out there interests me. I am sure that there is stuff out there I would like, but I am instead fed the tripe that the average teeny-bopper and idiot consumer will swallow. Instead, I am going over my 300+ CD collection and rediscovering music that I "own". Hey RIAA - up yours.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Wow, like I imagined, about 60% of the comments to this article are along the lines of "99 cents! What an amazingly large sum of money!" Come on geeks, here's your chance to put up or shut up. I can't count how many times I've heard someone say "if I could just buy two or three tracks instead of the whole album, I'd be there in a heartbeat." Well HERE IT IS! Go for it.
This article reminds me of a post I made a week or so ago... this quote sums up the geek mentality concerning online music services quite nicely:
"Well, IF they make available every song they've ever published and IF they make the songs available in mutiple MP3 bitrates and in OGG and in uncompressed PCM audio and in every other esoteric compression format I can think of and IF they can guarantee a full 10Mbps connection to me I *MIGHT* consider paying two dollars per month for the service. Until then, I'll continue to download music that I enjoy listening to but do not enjoying paying for."
Yes, and I think that BMW should lower the price of their cars as well. I mean, I can spend $15K on a car, $20K on a car, but not $40k. I barely have enough money to pay my mortgage and invest in my 401k and I'm supposed to be spending tens-of-thousands of dollars on a car?
I don't know why so many people think that pop music is a necessity is life. You're not "supposed" to be spending anything more than what you can afford on music.
IT IS A LUXURY, NOT A NECESSITY!
Keep in mind who the target audience is. Those of us who care a lot about the recording and mastering quality of the music we listen to (this includes early adopters of DVD-A and/or SACD) will NOT be using this service as our main source of music.
When I want a quality listening session, I pull my chair into the sweet spot, fire up the Pink Floyd DSotM SACD, and enter a realm of auditory bliss. When I'm more interested in variety than quality, then I'll hook the iPod up to the stereo and rock out. The flexibity of custom playlists comprised of legally-acquired, good-quality music far outweighs the downsides of any compression arftifacts that I may hear.
This service is not intended to replace buying your music on physical media. It's intended to replace hunting and downloading music of questionable quality and unknown content. (Who among us has not downloaded an incorrectly labeled MP3?) At the same time, it encourages music companies to transition to a new business model -- away from the album paradigm and toward a track-based paradigm. Imagine an artist's popularity being based on the number of tracks they sell as opposed to albums? There'd be far less fluff out there.
This service is absolutely the right thing at the right time. I downloaded iTunes 4 and started browsing the store as soon as the link appeared on Apple's home page (after clicking reload every few seconds like a well-seasoned FP troll). I took some willpower not to click buy. The free 30-second previews play instantly and are the same quality as the whole song. Where else can you get that?
Wow.
Am I the only one dismayed this is a U.S. only feature?
:)
-Nex
First iPhoto prints and hardback book ordering is U.S. only.
Then Sherlock is practically useless in non-U.S. countries.
Now this service IS useless. And there is no promise to bring it to international customers.
International users pay the same amount for our product, why do we lose out on some functionality? If you are an International (non-U.S.) Apple customer, then I invite you to sign the petition to promote more international-mindedness at Apple, which can be found here
Apple Features for International users petition
Please sign it if you are an international user frustrated by non being able to use this new service. (Moderators, if you have a mod or two to spare, I'm not below asking to mod this up if you feel Apple needs to spend more attention to the international community
This sig has been deprecated.
I as an independent musician and I am sure there are others would like to get in on this Apple Music store too. Is there any news if they will have an mp3.com-esque section to this thing? I think this would be the best way for artists to begin to sell to the end users directly.
ohlssonvox
http://ohlssonvox.8k.com
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
1) The interface is great, much better than working through the web (aka amazon) to buy, especially for sampling. However browsing can be tricky with so many bands, so searching is a must.
2) Like amazon, there should be the ability to post reviews, suggestions, and personal playlists (based on iTunes playlists, naturally, possibly automatically culled). Also it would be nice to have the option to buy the CD, although that would best be addressed with a tie in link. Oh yeah, links to official band/album websites would be nice.
3) $0.99 for a song is not unreasonable, if you're only going to buy a couple of songs off an album. $9.99 for an album is probably more than it could be. No doubt there are actuaries in the works. In fact, for $0.99 is probably too little for albums where the songs are all long, depressing the price of the album. This includes mainly Jazz and Classical works. Really, prices for individual songs and albums should be much more variable, based on the set album cost and the song length, with the popular songs boosted in price a bit over that number.
4) There isn't enough content. I couldn't find even half of what I was looking for. There ought to be a way for small labels and independents to get in on the action. Allowing them to host their own music and samples through the iTunes music store interface would be the most reasonable way.
5) There are way too many partial albums. I have no idea why you would only put up some songs off an album - did they not have all the source recordings for the entire album?
6) Once Apple has expanded the service outside of America, they should provide a way to buy music from overseas as well. Under the current distribution model, (true) international music is difficult to find and get.
7) I couldn't find the Fleetwood Mac "Peacekeeper" song that just came out, even though they were right on the front page. Bad Apple. I have a feeling the big 5 made them jump through more than a few hoops to get where they are now, and are still calling a lot of the shots with regard to what is actually offered.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Well, this will probably get buried because there are so many comments, but anyway...
I just downloaded a track off of the new site. In toying around I opened it up in the Quicktime player and saved the music file as a self-contained movie. Then I threw it back into iTunes to see what would happen.
It doesn't see the file as protected audio. If I get info for the purchased tracks it lists them as "Protected AAC Audio", but the track I ran through Quicktime is listed as a "Quicktime Movie File". It sounds exactly the same and iTunes treats it as just another music file. Interesting.
Anybody else have any luck? I love the new store and I plan on purchasing often, but it is odd that the DRM can be stripped out (possibly) by another Apple software product.
So I've just been checking this out, browsing around and looking at what there is to see in the iTunes Music Store. I've been really excited to see this, because I've been wanting a reasonable online music service for a while.
So I decide on a test. I like Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By", but I don't have the CD. That would be a pretty cool song to buy for a buck. So I browse on over to "Electronica" and look for the CD. I find it. Yay!
You can't buy the song "Days Go By".
You can buy any of the other songs on the CD individually, and you can buy the whole CD including "Days Go By" for a paltry $12. But you can't just by the one song that everyone might actually want by itself.
BOGUS! I had no idea they would do something like that. Surprised? Not really. But I am sorely disappointed.
Sarah
Anyway, my first suspicion about the price is that it's higher than it will eventually be. And I'm right about that.
This is from http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58656-2
So those of you too cheap to pay up can sit back and wait for a while and stop griping. This service is going to cater to you as well.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Ok, lets just do the maths on that.
We'll do it first in US dollars, because the number is one that has been quoted (I'm an Aussie):
A song costs $US 0.99 A CD contains ~ 17 tracks, or $US 16.83
The current exchange rate is ~ 0.60
Thus a CD worth of songs costs: $AUD 28.05
Now in addition to this, you're also paying for bandwidth, because unlike purchasing the CD in the shop where the distribution network is paid for by the supplier, the electronic distribution is now paid for by you.
Lets assume for a moment you have a basic ADSL account, lets say 256K download, with a 2Gb cap. Cost is $AUD 60.00
A song is roughly 3.5Mb (based on looking at the songs on my HD, guestimating an average size), thus with your 2Gb cap you can download about 580 songs. Thus each song also costs $AUD 0.10 in download charge.
A 256K ADSL account has a throughput of about 25Kb per second. Thus each song will take just over 2 minutes to download.
You save on time going to the shop and you save on your bus fare getting there.
To download your CD would cost you around $AUD 29.75.
You end up with a CD worth of music, which takes up around 60Mb of space on your hard disk. A 20Gb HDD costs around $AUD 100, so you can store around 60 CD's worth, or around 5850 songs. Cost per song: $AUD 0.02.
So your CD has now cost:
$AUD 28.05 charge to purchase
$AUD 1.70 charge to download
$AUD 0.34 charge to store
Total: $AUD 30.09
For this $AUD 30.09 you get an electronic copy of a CD, with no media to use in your car (additional cost $AUD 0.50 for a Blank CD), no case to store it in (additional cost $AUD 1.00 for a case), no cover booklet (additional cost of $AUD 0.20), all for the convenience of electronic shopping.
To top it off, if you haven't burned a CD of your tracks, if your hard disk crashes, or your files get accidentally deleted, you have nothing and you can pay for your music again.
Contrast this with buying a CD in a store, which can cost you anywhere between $AUD 19.95 and $AUD 29.95, plus $AUD 1.50 for the bus.
And finally, for the audio purists among us. We're not talking about CD quality music here, we're talking compressed MPEG. A CD quality download is 650Mb, thus you can only download 3 CD's for your $AUD 60. Making the download cost $AUD 20 per CD. It would also take nearly 7.5 hours per CD on your 256K ADSL account.
As an aside, the electronic CD shop consists of an Internet connection, a server farm and software. The current method of distributing CDs involves printing CDs, booklets, boxes, posters. Shipping them across the globe, putting them into warehouses, shipping product to shops, stocking shelves and returning faulty CDs.
Are the record companies excited - I would be if I could make money for nothing!
So, perhaps it will go well. But at these prices I won't be a shopper.
Disclaimer:
All care has been taken to make these calculations accurate. All prices are Australian dollars - except the inital quote for $0.99 per track. One Australian dollar is calculated to buy 0.60 US dollars. 1Gb is 1024Mb, 1Mb is 1024Kb. A 256K download link is 25Kb/s effective throughput. A song size is guestimated at 3.5Mb. A CD is taken to have around 17 songs.
|>>?
OK, stop laughing. It *might* not have worked perfectly the first time, right?
Words fail me here. I think when this sinks in with other people, that Apple could sell a couple million Macs *just* for this one feature alone. Oh, I'm sure the new codec is nice, and I might even buy a track or three from the Music store, but transparent wireless music sharing is just so much more than that.
Babar
Yeah, I'm one of those freaks that actually used Napster to find rare or out-of-print (or never-printed) tracks, or to preview CDs before I bought them. My music tastes range all over the place, and so I can't necessarily find someone who has the exact CD I'm looking for, and I've never liked using Kazaa for that kind of thing, what with mislabeled or partial files floating all over the place. Unlike some people on here, I don't have all the time in the world to hunt down music on P2P networks.
I see the iTunes music store as a way to preview an album before I buy and make my own rips; free 30-second previews of any track, and buy a track or two to listen to the whole song to see if I like.
Or I can use it to pick up those one or two tracks off of a CD when I don't want whole whole disc; the first two I bought were "Friends" by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow for my wife, and Eminem's "Lose Yourself" off of the 8 Mile soundtrack for myself.
This may not be the cheapest solution for online music buying, and I wish they offered the choice of MP3s so I can save myself the hassle or ripping them myself (it does look like it's possible to burn the AAC files onto a CD, so I can rip them on my PC for use in my Nomad), but it's just convenient enough to make it worth my while. (Heck, 90% of my music listening is done through iTunes anyway...)
Jay