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iTunes Music Store sells 275,000 Tracks in 18 Hours
physicsnerd writes "According to this article on Billboard.com, Apple's iTunes Music store sold 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours of operation. The Register.com estimates that this netted Apple just under $100,000! Not too bad for a 99 cents store."
Impressive considering the connection problems people were having. Remains to be seen what usage will be after the hype settles down.
This is a good thing but I have a feeling that the numbers in 60 or 90 days will have a lot more to say about how viable this is.
They need to sort out international licensing too, This could be huge in the UK where albums frequently cost as much in pounds as they do in dollars here in the US.
Something I really appreciate about this move from Apple is that they are actually offering the only decent point of comparison with GNUArt :
Besides p2p which is illicit, they are indeed selling professional stuff whereas GNUArtists are sharing their own amateurish but "Open-sourced" stuff ; once people will realize they have to pay 7425$ to fill their new iPod, they'll also want to visit Free galleries such as ours.
So, we can only benefit from this "competition".
Thanks, Herr Jobs !
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This should send (yet another) wake up call to the music industry. Online music trading is so pervasive only because it beats the hell out of paying $18US for a music cd. This is merely a step in the right direction - this is by no means perfect or even viable long term. I don't give this good chances over time - a pioneer is the guy (or gal) laying in the field with an arrow in their back. But, it's a start, and maybe it'll whack some of the riaa/mpaa execs with a cluebat.
I was very envious today when my friend with his ibook was able to log into iTunes and download 15 songs in minutes. Since it stores you credit card, it is perhaps TOO easy to download songs (Parents giving credit card numbers to kids may find a large bill next month).
I may now have to buy an Apple just to use the service. It's easy to use, has a wide selection, and is everything a music service should be. Only time will tell if they have the pricing right.
I don't know what took the music industry so long.
I started thinking, Why is the price $0.99 versus $1.00? Then I expanded on that and started thinking about how Apple come up with their pricing scheme. What is the optimal pricing? Was $0.99 selected by guess and by golly? What is the right price? Does anyone know how the $0.99 price was actually selected? My guess is that it was a ... guess.
How to Download YouTube Videos
I love macs and all, but what if I want to listen to downloaded music on the equipment I invested in that only supports MP3? AAC wont work in my Aiwa CDC-MP3, will it? NO. Guess I stay with Limewire.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
While I don't really like DRM, I can see where the music industry is coming from on the topic, and I suspect that they were the ones behind the whole thing.
What I'd like to see is a per-song DRM, where the artists or labels get to choose whether the song can be freely copied after purchase or not. Perhaps that, coupled with a price change for non-DRM-enforced songs, would push the rest of the industry in the direction we all want it to go. I'm sure the indie crowd would get behind the idea, as well as the brighter label execs and artists.
For you PC users who haven't seen the store, let me tell you, that place is addictive as crack rock. The default settings are such that you click "buy song" and it starts downloading. With a cable modem, I was able to get an album of 9 Tracks in a few minutes. All without getting my lazy ass up and going to the store.
I expect that within a year, there will be MUG meets where the topic of discussion will be "Music Store Addiction:How I lost my wife and house downloading music".
Just wait till Apple releases iTunes for Windows, so you PC users can join in the fun.
Burn Hollywood Burn
...well, almost.
:-)
It might make sense to consider something like a 17" iMac as purely a home-entertainment component. Sure, it's $1800, but you'll probably eventually spend more than that at the iMusic store
Anyone want to bet on how many days go by before someone has reverse-engineered the MaciMusic store protocol and written an app that masquerades as iTunes-on-a-Mac thus allowing Linux and Windows users to purchase music through Apple?
G.
> Can't wait for no DRM? That is like saying you can't wait until Best Buy gets
> rid of those pesky cashiers. Why don't they just trust me to leave an
> appropriate amount of money for the goods that I walk out of the store with??
> They are treating me like a criminal. Wah.
Sad part is, even thou the above was posted by an AC and modded down to -1 flamebait, he's 100% right and not flaming anything at all.
Those moderators should be ashamed.
The music industry doesnt give a shit.
Think about it.
Under the current system, they press and market the CDs. The retail chains sell them. The retail chains pay for the whole infrastructure for shipping and whatnot.
Aside from production and marketing, there is no overhead for the producers.
If the producers had to set up their own 'online retail' outlets, there would be a massive amount of overhead for servers, software, bandwidth and staff. It would cost them more to distribute the music this way.
Third parties would have to create the e-biz infrastructure, shoulder that overhead, and pay the producers their due royalties. This is what Apple did, and there's nothing stopping someone else from doing it except cash and lack of customer base.
The RIAA/MPAA dont give a shit either way, so long as they aren't losing money on the deal.
Here in Canada I can't buy squat from the iTunes Music Store, but I have been playing with it since it 'opened for business' - we can preview, but not actually buy anything outside of the U.S.
.Mac users can peddle their wares through the online store. I hope their selection grows quickly (yes there's a lot of stuff missing right now). I hope they increase their bitrate (I can hear the difference between the streamed previews and actual CD's). The DRM is not ideal, but in practice it's not imposing. Windows version is coming soon. ...And... dammit... bring it to Canada! iWant to go shopping!!!
If I was allowed to buy, I probably would have purchased 10-20 songs by now.
Yes I have Acquisition (a really sweet Mac Gnutella client), and I have the usual assortment of piracy^H^H^H^H^H^H file sharing tools for Windows, but in that sea of file searching it's easy to lose one's vision of a really nice way to download music.
For example: I figured I would try to find some old Tears For Fears music. In the search field I just typed "Tears For Fears". In less than 5 seconds I had a track listing of 6 different Tears For Fears albums, including tracks I never knew they had done (did you know they covered Bowie's 'Ashes to Ashes'?)
Let me say this another way to better illustrate just how cool it is: it was EVERY ALBUM TRACK, listed only ONCE. I pick the song and I get it, really fast. With a file sharing app I pick from a list of thousands of different rips of the same songs, all of varying quality. I hit download, and maybe the host is slow. Maybe I get a "swarmed" download that won't be reconstructed properly when it gets here. Maybe it won't even really be the song I think I'm downloading. Maybe I get "remotely queued". Maybe it looked like a good bitrate before I downloaded it, but it turned out to be a crappy rip.
On the Apple service I hit "play" and I'm previewing the music in real time. I hit "download" and I've got the actual song I want, with no glitches.
Seriously - with these advantages, plus the fact that it is actually legal, I can't see why people wouldn't shell out a buck a song.
Like everybody else I hope Apple creates an indy section, maybe even something iDisk-based so that
I mean, at 20Euro per CD with 10 songs, their offering is very competitive. DRM? Don't care too much: I can burn it on CD and it's usually from a CD that I listen to music. I also have a MiniDisc player/recorder and the DRM has only slapped me in the face once, when a musician friend of mine gave me a CD-R-Audio.
Good idea recommeniding the indy bands... I think I'm going to do that.
As someone who switch to Macs last year, I read about the announcement a little after it happened, downloaded iTunes4 and gave it a test run.
I don't know about the connection errors others were reporting, as I didn't have any. I already own an iPod, so the AAC/MP3 issue isn't one for me as it is for some others making posts here. I also had no problem setting up my account - I had an account when I bought my first Mac a year ago, and just used that.
The biggest thing I noticed when I started it up was the ability to finally buy the 1 song off of a track I wanted. Bob Dylan is OK, but I just wanted "Growing in the Wind". That's it. A buck later, and I had it. Another 2 or 3 minutes later, it was on.
From there, I wound up spending $20 on the service. No problems, except that it didn't have everything I wanted (I'm still trying to get Queen's Bohemien Rhapsody). But I spend more in 2 days than I've spent on music in 1 year.
Is is perfect? No, but you don't need an iPod - you can burn the music to a regular audio CD if you like, and either rerip this to MP3 (with a loss of quality), or just play the CD in a regular player.
But so far, it's 95% of what I've wanted with online music sales. Hopefully they'll get more music on there, maybe even some game/anime music (as that stuff is *way* more expensive than it needs to be), and more players out there will start support AAC. I'm not worried about the latter - since its part of the MPEG-4 standard, that should only be a matter of time and a firmware upgrade later.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I would be one of the people downloading a tune, but I don't own the hardware. I'd like to see the stats on what songs were downloaded.
Anyway, I got this in my email box this morning from Michael Robertson of Lindows and former CEO of MP3.COM. I find it coincidental after this Interview session, and I find his comments about Apple selling out intersting. The text of his (mass) email follows:
Most of you probably know that my former company was MP3.com, which was instrumental in bringing digital music to the masses. One of the things we stood for at MP3.com was the consumer's rights over their own music collection. Our belief was that consumers who purchase their music should have the ability to convert that music into a format they like and put the music on any device they desire. We even tried to get a law pushed through congress affirming this (we did not succeed in that attempt). The last five years have seen multiple attempts to limit consumers' rights via DRM (digital rights management) technology. These are schemes which add "big brother" restrictions to what you can do with your own music library.
It's no secret that the major record labels want to embed restrictions into music and force those restrictions onto customers, but recently they've been getting help from some surprising sources -- namely Microsoft and Apple. While I was the CEO of MP3.com, Microsoft repeatedly offered millions of dollars to us to convert the library of tunes at MP3.com from consumer friendly MP3 to Windows Media format. We always politely declined. Microsoft's strategy was that if they could get the whole world to convert to Windows Media, then they could get the record labels to pay them huge sums to limit how consumers could listen to their music. Thank goodness that hasn't happened yet, because having your music "expire", disappear, degrade in quality, not be able to burn to CD or load onto your devices is an awful consumer experience.
Microsoft is at it again though, trying to use their money and dominance in the OS to get a foothold in music by selling out consumers. Recently, news.com reported that Microsoft is cozzying up to the leading CD restriction company. This means we're one baby step away from all music CDs ONLY playing on Microsoft Windows XP. Imagine having to buy a copy of Microsoft Windows XP for every music device just so you can listen to your own music, and even then being restricted from making a compilation CD for your car!
Apple has understandably succumbed to pressure from the music labels to bolster their chances of securing music licenses for their iTunes music service by trampling music buyers rights. The 2.4% of the world which use Macs will find out that all the music in their newly announced service is wrapped in a digital padlock. This gives Apple (or the record labels) the ability to control what a buyer can do with the music they purchase. The user doesn't get to pick which computer they can listen to their music on (Macs only). Forget any device that isn't an iPod, like my current MP3 player (tiny, no cables, rechargeable battery - nice). Don't even think about burning a disc full of 100 MP3s to play in your DVD player. (Have you noticed virtually all new DVD players will play MP3 files?)
Straight ahead of us is a world where CDs will only play in Microsoft Windows XP computers. Digital songs you buy online will only work with Apple software or an Apple sanctioned portable player. You will not be able to burn any of the music you've purchased onto an MP3 CD to pop into your DVD player. That's a sad and expensive world for music fans because labels and large corporations will extort money from their users who just want to enjoy their own music.
When you pay for music, you should be able to enjoy that music in all the different and convenient ways available. I'm still a big believer in the value of MP3 because it ensures that the
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Call me old fashioned but I personally like the idea of 'Albums'. With decent bands you get what the artist wanted...A collection of songs that represents an time/place/idea. As a cohesive whole it sounds better than a single and has a much better listening experience.
With that in mind I would like to be able to download whole albums off iTunes and while that is happening they ship me the pysical CD/Vinyl as well. I wouldn't even mind paying retail CD prices + Postage. This way I get a CD/Vinyl which is superior to any downloadable music format and the convienience of instant listening gratification.
Until this happens I will still buy 99% of my music from the store.
[Please type your sig here.]
That analogy is flawed. DRM is more like Best Buy sending a security guard home with you to make sure you don't use the products you buy in any way they don't approve of. For instance, I can play CD's I purchase in any number of players, copy them to my various computers, enjoy them on my portable player, and so forth. My music server is a Linux box, though; I cannot use it to play DRM-encumbered music, because Apple has not chosen to make Linux software available for their protection scheme. That's their prerogative, but it means that their music isn't terribly useful to me.
I applaud Apple's effort to be reasonable, but DRM is still unacceptable. I wrote a short essay on why I believe this; it's on my site.
Furthermore, sharing is a fundamental part of experiencing music. I believe that noncommercial song swapping should be fully protected under copyright law.
-John
And evidently you've missed out on the shocking revelation that those self-checkout lanes have been something of a disaster, as they facilitate theft (gee, who'd have thought?).
Actually, there's even a bit of a backlash against this practice in some circles. In addition to being perceived as less expensive, products priced this way are also perceived as 'cheap'--lower in quality, and so forth. If you go to an upscale restaurant (or a restaurant that wants to be thought of as upscale, at least) you'll notice that the prices drop the decimals altogether. That salad isn't $15.99, it's $16. That steak isn't $42.95, it's $43. The last digit will almost never be a nine, either.
Incidentally, I'm surprised that Apple hasn't pegged their price at $0.95 rather $0.99, for exactly the reason that you mention.
~Idarubicin
Do you think Apple could make a physical presence in music stores a possibility?
Much like the Software-2-Go kiosks in stores, there could be a Music-2-Go kiosk. You would create or sign into your AMS account and purchase music. An extra $2.50 or so for the on-site burning, cover art, etc. I don't think it could do the booklets, but maybe...
Of course, you would also be able to burn music you already own. You fly across the country, stop into a music store, burn a CD for $2.50, and pop it into your rental car's CD player.
It's an interesting thought.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
AAC is *at least* as open as MP3. Before someone mentions Vorbis...
If you only use Ogg Vorbis:
Then you don't use a portable digital music player... which would suggest you hang around a computer to listen to music... which is a really boring way to be...
4 tracks a second means 120 million tracks a year or roughly about 3% of all retail tracks sold by the music companies which have licenses with apple. my guess is that for every 1 apple owner, there are 100 CD player owners. So an average Apple owners are buying three times more tracks than an average CD player owner is buying in retail market! Indeed amazing if the trend continues.
Apple may very well succeed because of the low investment necessary...
Not that low of an investmet at all, actually. According to this interview:
TIME: Can you say anything about [Music Store's] development costs or Apple's investment?
Jobs: I had somebody comment today, "Now that you have introduced your store, do you expect a lot others?" And I guess our answer is no. This is really hard. Over the last several years we've created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that's tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms ? it's huge ? and we've already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that's tens of millions of dollars. We have one-click shopping, only us and Amazon have that, and then to make a jukebox ? how much does it cost to make iTunes and make it popular? A lot! But we've got that. And then iPod, if you want to make an iPod, what does that cost? Well, nobody has done it but us, people have tried, but they haven't even come close. That's a lot of money. So we've already made these investments and we can leverage them. And then we've invested more on top of that to make a store. But to recreate this, it's tens of millions of dollars and years. That's why I don't think this is going to be so easy to copy.
Does anyone here recall when Apple released the iPod? The story here on slashdot contained two sentences after the submission. One of which simply read (and I quote): "Lame."
I think it's fair to say that "Slashdot wisdom" concerning these things isn't exactly a great indicator of success or failure. Everyone here on slashdot either has an iPod or wants one. Yeah, even if it doesn't run Linux.
Slashdot readership as a whole may contain a lot of knowledge and wisdom. That's why I come here. But it certainly doesn't have a finger on the pulse of consumer-oriented technology.
And for the record, I think Apple has gotten this thing about 95% right straight out of the gate. Clearly it is going to be the model for how this is done for everyone else. Kudos to them. They deserve it.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
the first comment to this hint gives the format for queries to the apple music store.
Imagine a replacement for the traditional jukebox found in Bars and Billard Halls. Set up a kiosk running iTunes that excepts money and voila, you have a jukebox that you'll never have to go out and buy cds for. Think of all the money the owner could make.
Here's the rant I sent to Apple, here's hoping they improve. Or feh, we can just follow some people's example and use eMusic.
:30, your clip is over and you never get to hear her sing! I should think her beautiful voice would be a great selling point!
:41, which is 11 seconds past your preview clip.
---
Hi! I am a big fan of Massive Attack, and am pleased to see you feature them in your "Exclusive" section in the "Music Store" section of iTunes4.
However, I cannot decide whether to buy the new exclusive album (or any tracks from it), because your 30-second preview is not a reliable indicator of what a song is actually like.
How do I know this? Because I already own some of the songs you preview.
For example, I bought the CD by Massive Attack "Protection" when it came out, so I know that your 30-second preview does no justice at all to the songs.
"Better Things" is a perfect example. Tracey Thorn doesn't start singing until 1:09, but by
Also, why is "Protection" the song not featured for download from the "Protection" album by the same name? That's the very best song on the whole disk, and it isn't there at all. Even if it were, the preview would do no good for it, either, because for this song, Tracey doesn't start singing until
If you want to sell songs, you need to put in the extra work to grab the part of the clip that is most likely to get the listener's interest.
-c
99 cents is the right price. I feel totally comfortable blowing 99 cents multiple times for music. 99 cents is the cost of a cheap hamburger at McDonald's. And, most pop music today is about as disposable and meaningful as a hamburger at McDonalds. And as for quality, this is unimportant to me as well. We're talking about pop music here, not the Taj Mahal or the Mona Lisa. It's disposable, useless fluff. Of course I would want better quality if it were offered, but will hearing Whitesnake or New Kids on The Block in better quality improve the music any?
Next I notice one great benefit of buying music this way is you don't get a jewel case or liner notes. That's right, you heard me correct. I actually don't use either. Pretty much every CD I've bought in the past year has been immediately ripped into iTunes, the CD with liner notes stuffed in an envelope and the jewel case tossed. The CD essentially only exists for me as a backup medium. I can't remember the last time I even felt the need to look at the disc jacket. Saving the time of me chucking the box and the materials is easily worth 99 cents, and the 9.99 for an album is a steal. I hope to never set foot in a record store again, nor pay Amazon to ship me a bunch of crap I will never use, including the CD.
Secondly, one thing that is awesome about the new version of iTunes is the Rendevous capability. I crack open my iBook, and the entire library of mp3s on my main Mac appears. Holy cow ... now I can have one copy of my entire library and serve it up without lifting a finger.
Then, I read you can do the same thing, over the net. Meaning, I can be at work on my mac and have access to my entire mp3 library. Holy cow again.
I can hardly wait until they slap Airport on an iPod and do the same thing. Can you imagine just walking down the street and a new playlist shows up on your iPod from some guy walking buy you... arrrgh I'm foaming at the mouth.
The Apple Music Store: I'ts cool.
Who says Apple can't remove the iTunes-mandated DRM from their files, or start offering MP3's with their service? Apple is playing a good middle ground. They're trying to make a popular service without opening themselves up for litigation.
As much as we hate it, the DMCA pretty much requires Apple to actively move to protect the labels' interests, or risk lawsuits for 'contributing to piracy'. If we assume that MP3's are right out, I can't imagine that they'd even want to deal with the legal hassle of providing music to Linux or Windows users at all -- the only real DRM formats (WMA, RM) belong to their competition and would require them to basically duplicate their entire library in addition to paying royalties. And let's face it, they're not going to get anyone on board for MP3.
RIAA: "Apple, by providing unencrypted, easily copied MP3 files to Personal Computers, a known bastion of music theft, has materially damaged our business model and violated our agreement."
Apple: "But it's what the consumers wanted."
RIAA: "So what? You are on the way to destruction. For great justice, All your base are belong to us."
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
If any other company, MS, and RIAA member, or even the FSF opened a music store and choose a closed proprietary format over MP3 or of course Vorbis this /. crowd would be all over them. If this was Warner Brothers Music people would be screaming how AOL was trying to destroy open formats with DRM that restricted yadda yadda yadda.
but no, its apple, so everyone creams in their pants and begs for more. I can't understand how a company whose practices go against everything FS/OS stands for in such a drastic way is so loved by the same crowd.
Imagine what the world would be like if MS had the monopoly *and* the control apple has over its products and customers. man I'll leave the over priced/ closed / hardware-software lockin at the door thank you very much.
Apple's AAC (m4p) format uses security to protect the track from being played on more than 3 computers. Yet, you can copy the AAC file to as many iPod's as you desire. Do the iPods have a global key, or is the data in the AAC not encrypted and the iPod simply ignores the security feature? Has anyone dug around on their iPod to see how the songs are stored on the iPod disk once copied to the iPod from iTunes? I need to do that when I go home today. Hmmmmm, seems like that could be a possible loop hole in the security, which makes the tracks vulnerable to showing up on Kaaza for the world to copy.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
$275,000 is the gross. After paying the record companies they clear $100,000. That is not "NETTED", the is still more to cover like the bandwidth, the servers, rent, support staff, for the day. 275,000 songs is approximately 805 GB of bandwidth. That is a sustained bandwidth of about 100Mbit/sec. If they clear $10,000 for the day, they will be lucky. Plus this is the opening day. On average a grand opening well marketed does about 5x then an average day. So if Apple breaks even on this they will be lucky.
Apple computers cost more... not for an equivalent machine, but because they don't have low end machines. This results in price senstive customers going elsewhere (BTW: I moved my office to OS X, I don't think that the machines are overpriced).
As a result, Apple, with 4% of sales (and probably 6%-8% of the online market, as Apple machines tend to stay deployed longer), Apple has a thriving Shareware market, and now an online music market. While Apple is a SMALL piece of the desktop computer market, the users are more interested in purchasing things.
This results in that 4%-8% of the PC market POSSIBLY being anywhere from 10%-50% of the potential online music buying crowd. The iPod, clearly the "best" if not expensive MP3 player, is 50%-50% Mac-Windows sales. So while the iPod is special (Mac users tend to actually LIKE Apple), music may be similar.
I LOVE iTunes 4. A bunch of us upgraded at the office, and we can play each other's music which is cool. I bought a few tracks of songs that I find catchy but don't like (nice background music when zoning or at the gym). I won't rerip my existing CDs, but new CDs are going to be AAC encoded.
iTunes 4 is a great program, almost makes a Mac worthwhile. There are other little apps like that that make the Mac a nice platform.
Alex
OK, so unless something has really changed, the RIAA gets nothing. Some music companies get something. And this, I think, is the key point: the labels that have the most to gain from this are the small ones that you are less likely to find on your local store's shelves. And, moving beyond that, a viable buy-online system *not* run by a label will make it far more likely that unsigned acts can get a better deal.
And I really do think this will help bands in a major way. While you're listening to the song you'll probably buy, you can't help look at the box on the right that says "people who bought 'Ana Ng' also bought 'Funky Périphérique' by Les Sans Culottes". [Disclaimer: neither song is currently available at the site although they certainly should be.] To be completely honest, a working online music buying system will really be the end of the big labels as we know them.
Babar
Apple has some of the best PR people in the world. They've come up before with bombastic statements like OS 9.0 server running TCP/IP stack 4 times faster than Windows NT. Simply put: if this is coming from Apple I would check another source. Otherwise this is excelent news...if its true that is.
Then I bought about 184 songs and albums (combo number, I think it was about 6 albums and various singles). All I've got to say is I've spent more on music since this store came into being than I have in YEARS. I don't mind the DRM nonsense. I've got nothing to hide anymore, this just adds to my big ass collection of music. I've burned a few compliation albums for my brother, but otherwise I just use my Ipod and FM transmitter for music. I think it's a great service. Personally, I'm glad I don't HAVE to steal the singles anymore from the P2P places. I dig being able to click, download and be happy real fast. Without a virus being attached (Kazaa), broken songs (all the P2Ps), wrong songs (All), etc.. They've got one happy customer here in NY peace
I'm not entirely sure $100,000 dollars for a venture like this in 18 hours is that great. Sure, compared to what you or I make, 100,000 dollars in 18 hours is incredible, but if you factor in the amount of money they've put into running and creating the store, paired with the normal profit for a large scale commercial venture, I'd be interested in seeing exactly how well it has done in the grand scheme of things.
It's been a long time.
As a test, I downloaded a song in AAC format from the iTunes store that I already had ripped at 192 VBR MP3.
At first comparison, I thought the AAC file was good - until I listened on my "mastering headphones" (Grado SR325s, which rock, by the way - http://www.gradolabs.com ). Lots of bizzare compression artifacts.
So there I am, thinking AAC is garbage, until I remembered something about an "Enhancer" feature in iTunes. Sure enough, I look in preferences and there it is. I turned it off, and many / most / all? of the compression artifacts I heard went away.
So, before you try to asses whether you think AAC @ 128 is better than MP3s at 192, turn this "Enhancer" feature off, then judge.
In my opinion, AAC is living up to the hype.
The practice originally started in retail stores with cash registers. Clerks tended to ignore the new-fangled machines for purchases in whole numbers, so the numbers were changed to persuade the clerks to use the cash register to get the penny change. It didn't become popular in other forms of retail, such as catalog purchases, until about 50 years later.
This was pointed out by Bill Bryson in one of his books; I think it was Made in America.
well in the last 6 months ALL internet music sales combined added up to less than this figure.
in one day apple users alone doubled internet sales of downladable music. that's a smashing success. imagine if this had been international plus windows users too. damn!.
wired has the figures