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Apple Sells A Million Songs in Debut Week
Scrameustache writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store sold over one million songs during its first week. Over half of the songs were purchased as albums, and over half of the 200,000 songs offered on the iTunes Music Store were purchased at least once.
Those new iPods are selling like hotcakes too..."
I think the model may work. Let's hope it torpedoes the RIAA completely.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,58718,00. html
Offerings on P2P networks have almost tripled!
If this is Heaven I'm bailin out! I cant tolerate this ol tin-tub, so fulla trash and rats...
Well it seems to me that there's room for everything in this world. Room for people that want things the legal way and the whiners that love music for free that keep whining about not buying on the ITunes Music Store.
Let's see how this one keeps up for the next year!
Apple has found something to make it profitable. Quick sell the hardware side of the business.
Today I found a "New Music Tuesday" mailing in my inbox, from Apple, highlighting almost 20 recent (complete album) additions to the Music Store that are available as of today.
If they do that many every week, that is seriously gonna bolster their catalog.
~Philly
Most people aren't thieves. The merely want their content delivered the way they want it. It should be simple for a company to offer a better downloading experience then a decentralized p2p. I'd be willing to pay if the offer me more value then p2p programs. By that I mean easier searchs, high quality files, ability to find related music, and better availibility. RIAA has really been doing nothing but shooting itself it's foot and watching it bleed.
If they weren't restricting to credit cards with a US billing address. Like VISA isn't the same globally?
Ralf
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russel
I thought this iTunes thing was full of DRM gotchas, such as having to re-buy the songs if your computer died..? Are there really that many idiotic people around or am I just misinformed?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
How much of this success is due to this being a truly significant advance in implementations versus Apple simply having a heavy presence in the market?
I'm not trying to sideline the significance of the success, I'm just questioning why it is really successful. From what I have heard, this is not all that much different than approaches that others took earlier (Didn't eMusic, the popular word among those that don't like iTunes, originally sell per song?).
Alternatively still, maybe the market is just now ready for such a store model as this. Timing is, afterall, very important in delivery of a product to market. Too early can be as devastating as too late.
well if you read the articles you will see that Apple's music store sold more songs in a week than the others have in months. Ignore the little Apple icon if you must and see it as *somebody* has possibly finally figured out a way to sell music downloads that people like. The question is how will the sales be in a few months. The Apple policy is a lot more reasonable than anyone else. None of the other services let you put the songs on a portable MP3 player, let alone burning it to an audio CD (which strips the DRM).
I'm still not sure how this service is going to make a lot of money. While a million tracks may sound impressive, you need to keep in mind that it's quite unlikely that they can keep that rate up for very long.
If the tracks were all sold as singles (they weren't) and if Apple kept all the money from the sale (they don't) AND if they could keep up their one million songs per week rate (doubtful), then by the end of a year they've made $52 million. Take out administration costs (I have no idea what they are, but I'm guessing they must be fairly significant) and the RIAA's big cut, and I'm guessing Apple would be left with somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million after a year, and that's ONLY if they keep up the sales rate they had in their initial week every week of the year. Sure, $30 million in revenue is nothing to sneeze at, but it's not going to convince anyone that online music sales are worthwhile.
Remember, $30-50 million is equal to the revenue from a couple platinum albums, and isn't enough to finance nearly as many artists as the current model can (keep in mind that every "flop" gets subsidized by hit records). I would expect that if the recording industry were to switch to this model that MORE over-produced pop garbage would be pushed since the dramatically lower revenues would keep the companies from taking many risks with "alternative" artists. And you thought it was bad now...
How much of this success is due to this being a truly significant advance in implementations versus Apple simply having a heavy presence in the market?
The secret is in the direct tie to iTunes. It's difficult to overstate how convenient it is to be able to shop for music within your music player as opposed to fiddling with some web-based download service.
This is the kind of thing which Apple's control over hardware, software, and consumer applications together permits it to excel at. What is astonishing is that Microsoft has proved so poor at this kind of coordination.
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
1 million songs at $0.99 is about $1 millions/week. Assuming that the demand stays constant--which is unlikely as there was probably pent-up demand, as well as let's give it a try users in the first week--the total revenue for the year will be about $52 million. Although this sounds like an astounding success, it is less than 0.2 percent of Dell's revenue (FY03 revenue $35.4 billion), and less than 0.02% of Walmart's revenue ($218 billion). And it will only account for 1% of Apple's revenue.
It blows my mind that Apple has been able to improve on the iPod. As if the original's form factor was too thick (not quite as thick as a deck of cards), they still somehow cut it almost in half.
I played around with the new music service this week. Super impressively done. Having said that, I don't think I'll order any music from it. The record companies have shown themselves to be complete bastards for decades now, in how they screw over the public and the artists. I hate to think that Apple's now riding to this industry's rescue, perhaps only a year or two before the entire industry would go down the crapper. If there was only some way I could use this service with the bulk of the money going straight to the artist, I'd be incredibly enthusiastic about this whole thing.
I'm always thrilled to see Apple succeed at something, since I think they tend to make beautifully designed products. I just hope that this success isn't the event that keeps the parasitic recording industry form withering away.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
I am pretty sure the restriction was with having the rights to international distribution worked out yet. Either on the Apple site or in the press release it states that they are working that out. Since the technology should be the same, i am guessing it's a legal issue. Odds are they will not have international rights to EVERYTHING in the catalog, so they will have to modify the store to display songs by the user's location. Maybe they will get past it, but in general stores/distros are restricted to certain territories.
I'm always thrilled to see Apple succeed at something, since I think they tend to make beautifully designed products. I just hope that this success isn't the event that keeps the parasitic recording industry form withering away.
Anything which encourages people to purchase music directly by cutting out the retail link can only help artists in the long run. If people get used to this kind of thing, they're much more likely to purchase music from independent artists someday - because independent artists will probably never be able to afford to get their CDs into record stores, but it won't be too much trouble for them to get onto download services.
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I think it might be closer to: somebody has possibly finally figured out that making products and services AVAILABLE to people who are proven to actually have the means and the inclination to ACTUALLY PAY FOR STUFF that they find valuable. Windows users buy their machines on price first, features second (and steal half their software from work third...), Linux users have moral objections to paying for stuff that's already been sold a million times, whereas Apple users understand that time pretty much equals money and would rather pay to take the hassle out of life and get on with the rest of theirs.
That was classic intercourse!
emusic.com does not carry next year's Grammy nominations but if you're into Jazz or older alternative it is cheaper than Apple's offering, has been along longer, and is not DRM restricted.
but I suspect it's due to licensing arrangements. Often the same artist is represented by different labels in different territories - he might have been signed in the UK by a small Indie, but needs big-muscle distribution to break the states etc. Big distributer sells in the US, indie still sells in UK.
This causes problems online though as customers and territories are now now no longer tied together - you could buy from whichever territory offered the cheapest identical product. One big free market.....nope, couldn't have that, could we? so that's why you need a US Visa.
I don't know if I am off the deep end, but it seems to me Apple didn't figure they would make BILLIONS off of selling songs for 99 cents.
:) Either way, life is easier with an Apple.
I do think they figured they would be able to sell their iPods at an increasing rate (which they have a much better profit margin on; 110,000 new iPods ordered this last week). They also are opening their arms to a new customer base, music-lovers. Now music-lovers will buy an iPod because they are amazing, but then will think: "if this is so cool, I should try the new iBook or PowerBook". Then Apple makes more profit there too. Who agrees? This is where they make their money, and then they have an Apple customer for life. Not bad for starting with a 99 cent sale.
I am an Apple customer for life, but mine started with 2500 dollars for a PowerBook.
Are there any other aac compatible players besides the iPod?
Apple charges way too much for their RAM. You're almost always better off buying an Apple system with whatever RAM it ships with, then buying more from someone else and installing it yourself.
um, it seems you're forgetting something: as yet iTMS is only available to US based Mac users, a teeny tiny proportion of global computer users.
Once Apple rolls out the international, and Windows versions of the service (and you can bet they WILL be released in that order) takings look set to rocket.
They should expose their store through XML-RPC or SOAP, so that I can write my own iTunes. The money would still go to them.
(Never gonna happen, I know.)
-jfedor
There are ways out there to play AACs other than iTunes 4 or an iPod (like VideoLAN Client, for example).
...
BUT the AAC files you buy from Apple are "locked down" to your Macs (you can authorize up to three Macs to play your music), so sharing them is of "limited value", to say the least.
AND all the files you buy from Apple are watermarked with YOUR name/e-mail address -- not exactly the kind of thing that makes you eager to put them up on the public p2p networks.
Yes, you can burn the AACs as plain audio onto a blank CD-R, and then re-rip and re-encode them as MP3s and then manually re-tag them, but as a file-conversion technique, this process takes a lot of time. And uses up an awful lot of plastic, too.
Apple's done a pretty good job of making it "appropriately difficult" for you to share the music you've bought with the entire planet. Now if only I could play those AACs on my Archos Jukebox, or in my car, or
-Mark
So you sit at your Apple (tm) Computer, load up your Apple (tm) OS, load the Apple (tm) iTunes(tm) software, click on the button which goes to the Apple (tm) iTunes (tm) Music Stores, buy some DRM-ed music and then save it on your MP3 player, which can only be an Apple (tm) iPod (tm).
And everyone on slashdot applauds...
I've been wondering about the resale value of these downloads. I typically sell my old CDs (secondspin.com or uzed.com) when my musical tastes change, I get tired of a CD or I simply need some cash. What will I do with songs downloaded from Apple?
People wanted to be able to download a wide variety of "good" music, load it onto an MP3 player and burn their own CD from their purchase. By all accounts (except perhaps those of some vocal sixteen year olds who think the world owes them a record collection) Apple has delivered this, They did the research, developed the tech, made the difficult deals, took the risks, generated the buzz, and now I hope they profit handsomely from it.
The RIAA reps the companies that get the music into the download -- engineers, producers, designers, and, yes, lawyers -- all of whom need to be paid, and will get their slice. The size of that slice is spelled out in a contract which both parties sign. Is the size of that slice "fair?" I dunno. What percentage of the price of that soda finds its way back to the chemists and bottlers? How many pennies on the cigar dollar get back to the guy rolling the leaves? How many nickels on the Big Mac pricetag work their way back to the cattlerancher? Do we stop consuming these products (and a million others) until we "ger answers?"
Say I'm a small-town chemist who just developed a new flavor -- how do I get my soda bottled and onto the shelves at the 7-11? You mean -- it's not easy?? I can't just pull my truck up to the back of ths store and stock the shelves myself? I have to make a [shudder] DEAL?! Oh, the Injustice!
Is this new venture going to change the world, overthrow evil, and bring about a Glorious Workers' Revolution? No, silly, it's gonna let you download music easily and legally onto your computers and disks. No more or less than it was designed to do.
I've never had a use for Apple, Macs, or Steve Jobs, but my hat is off to them on this.
AAC is not a proprietary format. It's the audio component of the MPEG-4 standard.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
This is what happens when you give a user a legitamate way to get music in digital form. My friends and I would pay a reasonable price for an MP3/OGG/? track if it was awailable (and NOT restricted, if I pay money, I better have the right to space shift it).
RAAA, get a clue!
Free speech is getting expensive...
You've missed several key points. If you read many of the press reports regarding this service, you'll find out that the big 5 labels were willing to give such liberal rights to Apple because it represents such a small share of the computer market. The major labels look upon this as an experiment. In fact, the contracts are written such that they can back out of the service after a year. If it continues to be such a success they intend to allow Apple to sell to Windows users. Basically, it is more than writing a Windows application. You need to sign agreements with the major labels. Apple is first in line.
Seems that the puny, marginal WebObjects server and development environment were able to serve within its first week:
1 million secure creditcard transactions
1 million downloads, at about 3MB each
untold millions of 30 second song preview streamings
a gazillion searches
megazillions of Music Store pageviews
You know, makes you wonder what these Apple guys are thinking, using such marginal, non-Microsoft-based enterprise server products!
Talk about taking risks. No-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft or Dell, uh? Why go to the fringes and buy WebObjects with unlimited users/sessions for about $1000? Are you nuts?
(tongue in cheek, for the humor impaired)
Cupertino, CA - Apple's recent announcement that over 1 million songs had been purchased in the first week of its new music store's existence presents undeniable proof that Apple users will overpay for anything.
More at BBSpot
siener's youtube channel
Blah. I'll probably get modded down, but here goes...
"The recording industry is evil" mantra is like the "Big business is evil" mantra. It sounds real good and may be partially true, but artists still happily sign with labels without having a gun put to their head.
If a band is playing in some garage and a record exec comes in and puts down a contract, very few bands will say, "No, you're THE MAN! We want to stay independent! Sure, only the people in this area may ever hear us and we may only sell 100 albums a year and still have to work full time jobs, but at least we won't be working for someone evil like you!"
Record companies do put a lot of money into new artists before they even sell jack. That's one of the reasons they take so much on the back end. They take the risk of putting down hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to pay and promote a new artist that no one has heard of and just the year before was only singing in their church choir. If the artist sells lots of albums, I think the record company SHOULD make many times it's original investment because they're the ones that took the risk, not the artist.
It's easy to say "Oh, with the Internet any artist can distribute music on their own!" Yeah, that may be true but you still have to figure out some way to get people to your site. Record companies spend a lot of their money on promotion and marketing. If you put up a web site to sell your CD, MP3, ACC, whatever, but can't afford the money to promote it, aren't getting air play, have no video on MTV, no one knows who you are, your songs sound like they were produced in a garage, and you just hope you can just get by by having one fan tell another who tells another, you're probably not going to make a lot of money.
Some people talk about the record companies and their high prices like they're the Iraqi regime. They're keeping a tight grip on MUSIC, people! It's entertainment, not food and water. If you hate them, don't buy their music, don't steal their music. Just walk away and go read a book.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
Since the iTunes Music Store works only with iTunes... and iTunes is only available at present on the Macintosh...
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Does the user ID of the person downloading the file get embedded in the AAC file in any way? Have AACs showed up on Kazaa yet?
Just curious, I don't own a Mac and I stopped using p2p nets.
there's no place like ~
I'd buy a million songs from myself as a PR stunt; while I was at it, I'd buy them as albums in order to make things look good to the music industry that I'm trying to woo.
Money can't buy everything, it's true, but it can buy a press release that may impress the idiots who run the music industry.
A million dollars a week is only 52 million dollars a year - that is CHUMP CHANGE. How much of that do you think went to the music industry? It's gonna take money, a whole lotta spendin' money, to make it worthwhile for the distribution oligopoly to embrace this.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Vindication.
And a bute rebuff against what the **AA's are trying to do; here is proff that they've been trying to defend an outdated bussines model.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Only a million dollars? From 5% of the market share, just in the US? You must be kidding. If this went cross-platform worldwide the money these people would make is astonomical. It's easy to use, and damn near addictive because you don't see the cost until you get your credit card bill a month later. Let's say, an average comsumer buys 2 CDs a month for approximately $30 (US). Now let's take the same user and give them access to all the same songs at $1 apiece. Plus when they download those songs let's just "suggest" they look at 5 more that are like each one. You have built in advertisement while the person is actually making the purchase, it is convenient, and they don't see any real tangible evidence that they've spent the money unless the go to the effort of burning CDs from the downloads. It's an ingenious system that has nowhere to go but up as far as profitibility is concerned. This week $1 million, next week 1.2 million. Next year, 100 million. 2 years from now, worldwide, the sky's the limit.
bkr
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Actually, every file sharing protocol except kazaa's is implemented on the mac.
And of course "most of those files sold were sold to Mac users" because iTMS is only available to iTunes-Users, and iTunes ist until now still mac-only.
What you need to remember, is that Apple is a HARDWARE company. Everything they do is to drive more hardware sales. Every product they make is going to come out first for the Mac to drive hardware sales. Why come out with a PC version immediately, and drive sales for your competitors?
iTunes Man
To the tune of "Piano Man" by Billy Joel
Filk by Scott Taylor
It's nine o' clock at the iTunes store,
A phenomenal crowd's logging on,
There's an old man on AOL
Finding music from ages bygone.
He says, "Steve can you play me a memory?"
"I'm not really sure how it goes"
"But I typed in a track and got album names back!"
"And I'm not even wearing my clothes!"
Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you're the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we're all in the mood for a melody,
And you've got the pricing just right.
Now Claude at Vivendi's a friend of mine
And his business is selling CDs.
And knows the solution for store distribution,
But he's worried about MP3s.
He says "Steve I believe this is killing us"
"All these pirates don't pay us a dime."
"Well I'm sure that you could be a billionaire"
"If you could sell music online."
Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you're the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we're all in the mood for a melody,
And you've got the pricing just right.
Now Paul is an iPod enthusiast
Who listens to Jazz with his wife
And he's chatting with Maxine, who's still in the rap scene
And probably will be for life.
And the waitress is downloading Dixie Chicks
As the dial-up man slowly gets Stones
Yes they're sharing the bandwidth from Akamai
But it's better than P2P clones.
Sell us a song, you're the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we're all in the mood for a melody,
And you've got the pricing just right.
Its a pretty good crowd for just Macintosh
And the PC guys give me a smile
Cause they know that iTunes will be Windows-bound soon
If they just can hold out for a while.
And the AAC sounds like originals
And rights management isn't a pain,
And they sit at the screens of their iTunes machines
And say "Man, this is worse than cocaine!"
Sell us a song, you're the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we're all in the mood for a melody,
And you've got the pricing just right.
Grub, my man, you must be the Slashdot master of one-liners. Your Karma-to-Words-Typed Ratio must be very impressive.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I've seen at least a dozen post in these Apple Music Store stories telling people that ask if they can download a song again to backup (complete with bold font to show their superior intellect).
Who has the time to do these constant backups of all the random crap on your computer. I try hard to keep copies of stuff like tax records, but I don't backup my music collection or other random junk.
Apple should allow people to download the songs again that they've already purchased. Live Phish allows you to do this. Maybe there is some DRM issue that makes this difficult, but, otherwise, I don't know why they wouldn't allow this.
-prator
There's a less invasive way to demonstrate that the m4p file contains the name/address of the purchaser: buy a song and e-mail the file to a friend who also has a Mac and iTunes4. When they double-click it open, they will be prompted to "authorize" their computer to play this song -- and the text of the prompt includes the e-mail address of the original purchaser, and prompts for their password. That the files contain the identity of the purchaser is not really a secret, especially given that it displays it prominently in the password challenge dialog box when m4p files are moved to a new computer. I found this the first time when my wife mailed me some songs she had bought, and I had to ask her to come over to my computer and enter her password.
But the easiest way to see that the songs contain the purchaser's name is this: open iTunes, click on a song you've purchased, and choose Get Info... and there's your name!
-Mark
Have you listened to an AAC at 128 bitrate? Albums of 20 songs only cost $9.99 A ten minute classical song costs only 0.99.
You can burn them to CD in straight audio format (aiff), no DRM included. After that you can do what you want, straight to mp3 and Kazaa if you feel the need... nearly as many times as you want (playlist has to change every ten burns). Every had your CD chewed up by a dog? scratched while moving? ever get a refund? isn't that what backups are all about?
Yes you are missing almost everything... you got the 0.99 a song part correct, everything else was just FUD. Insightful my arse.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I showed a relatively geeky PeeCee user iTunes and the iTunes music store the other day. He'd kind of wondered why me (the person who goes into his company to administer their Sun/Sybase servers) carries a Powerbook G4.
;-)
He was pretty awe struck when he saw the iTunes store, and also pretty impressed with how slick iTunes was in general. Notably, he was impressed with the amount of initial content Apple had up there, the fact that it downloads (and displays) album cover art, and the fact that previewing songs is STREAMED and not downloaded, meaning you can preview quickly.
He was equally impressed with my transparent terminal windows too
I'm not joining the "Macs are better than PCs" camp, just an interesting observation on what a PC user thought...he liked the transparent windows and the iTunes music store...which are BOTH things that are quick and easy to demonstrate at the point of sale....so maybe Apple might be able to "switch" a few more PC users with the tightly integrated music store?
YMMV.
-psy
Generally, I'm inclined to agree with you.
... not in most places, anyway.
However, what we (read: us consumers) need is for Apple to succeed, whether this is overpriced low-quality music or not. Based on my last trip to various CD-selling locations (just a few days ago), $12-$14 will not buy you the album from the record store
If Apple can make a success out of selling on-demand, relatively cheap music to individual consumers, and have some reasonable method to both allow those consumers to exercise their Fair Use rights while cutting down on piracy (even if it is only illusory), then the RIAA loses its most important argument: That online access to music, and swapping of music, costs the industry money. I mean, how true can it be if Apple is making money by lowering prices on music?
At the very least, it strengthens our (read: the anti-RIAA contingent) basic counter-argument to the RIAA: it is the exorbinant price of music, not piracy, that it costing the RIAA member companies money. Lower prices, and albums will sell better.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
an that is just to apple user and no one else. imagine if this had been world wide.
On the otherhand 1 million sales is a tiny drop in the record sales bucket. if there are 1 million songs sold that's less than 100,000 albums sold. which means over the course of a year that will mean about a million album sold if they can sustain this pace. that's trivial. how many times a year does a artist release an album that goes "platinum"? seems to me they are many every year, some from each record label. thus if apple sustains this pace it will only contribute a single platinum album. Of course there may be a large multiplier effect if the profit margins on this are higher/lower than normal album sales.
What this really shows is how utterly insignificant all of the the other on line music sales were prior to this. they didn't even register: a single mega-record store in NY city could outsell all of the annual online music in a good day prior to apple's involvment. likewise selling CDs by mail also vastly exceeded this market.
heck AOL sent out more of their free trial disks than that!
on the otherhand, once this hits the rest of the world and once this hits the windows world. now were talking a large dent in the sales of music online. again remeber their may b eprofit margin mulitpiers too. this will be true in places that yearn for "pop" music but dont have such good access to music stores as in the US. likewise, world artists will be able to crack the US market if apple lets in lables that lack US distribution systems.
now lets talk about how intrusive the DRM is. its not bad compared to all previous efforts. you can keep your music on a CD so insome sense you own it. but re-ripping it is supposed to be not so good, and thus since digital music is the only way you will be using music in the future having an unrippable high quality CD is not as good as it seems. Apple's tech knowledge base warns you to deauthenticate your mac before you reformat the disk or sell it. its not clear but it seems to imply that you could lose one of your 3 authentications if you dont.
Apple warns you they are free to change how they authenticate your music when you install it on a new mac any time they wish.
This lack of clarity over the authentication protool has me worried but not hyperventilating.
legitmate questions include:
1)how do I authenticate my music on future macs or ipods if mac sells its music store to someone who either goes out of bussiness or starts charging fees to authenticate. (dont laugh mac switched its bussiness model from free to pay for mac.com and claris works)
2) Someday i'll want to keep my music on my phone, credit- card computer, ring, implant, etc....will future itunes allow me to move music to non-mac music players?
3) if my computer is lost, the mother board dies, my hard disk crashes, or a virus eats it, or my employer seizes it before deauthenticate have I lost one of my authentications?
4) what if I go bankrupt and cant get a visa card. how do I maintain a music store account so I can authenticate?
5) in the future, will legacy macs that cant run the latest OS also not be able to de-authenticate?
As I said I'm not hyperventilating, and like 8-tracks and vinyl I dont have the unreasonable expectation that I wont want to replace my music media in the future. but I dont want to be forced to because say apple goes out of the music bussniess.
and yes I realize I can make an audio CD but its not the same as having bought a CD in the store since the store bought CD will rip to higher audio quality for use in digital players (and I predict in the future all useful players are going to be digital-- there wont be many CD players except as ripping devices)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Cheers to Apple for doing nearly the obvious (and that which record companies thus far have been unable to do, perhaps due to lack of vision (heads in asses and such)).
Now someone tell my why RIAA's members have been so busy chasing the negative side of internet music distribution instead of implementing something like this. In fact, it's likely that MP3.com might have arrived at something similar to this, had they not been on the wrong end of pointy lawyers.
There's no magic in this formula. The only really creative aspect is perhaps the user interface presented by Apple. There's no good reason the record companies couldn't have done this themselves, with good developers.
Of course, there's a negative side to this. Apple is (inadvertently?) furthering the status quo in the music industry. I think the music industry had been heading for a major shakeup, where artists were going to gain some control back over their works (not to mention some real compensation).
So, *cheers* and *jeers* I guess :)
.sigs are for post^Hers.
First, it's more convienent than going to a brick-and-mortar music store. I don't have to get in the car and go anywhere, I don't have to dig through the racks to maybe find what I'm looking for, and I don't have to stand in line to hand one of the pierced nation my money.
Second, Apple's pricing scheme is right on the money. Been looking for a couple of tracks? Buy just the ones you want. Want the whole album? OK then.
Third, the tie-in to the iPod is great. While I don't have an iPod yet, I can imagine how much simpler it will be to download songs from the store directly to the iPod without having to rip the CD.
I think the reason so many people steal music (and if you don't pay for it, it's stealing) is that convienence factor. I've used Kazaa on my wintel laptop and iSwipe on my iBook to grab tracks from things I used to own on tape (yes, I was probably stealing. I feel bad about it, really). It's always been a big hassle to find exactly the track I want, correctly ripped, on a site with enough bandwidth to support the download etc etc etc.
Apple has made it easy and cheap to find what I want. DRM? I don't care, because I'm not going to be reposting my songs to a P2P network. I'll be burning CD's for use in the car, and I can take a CD anywhere.
I don't forsee Apple being the big dog in the online music business forever, but, as usual, they've shown the rest of the computing world that it can be done, and the method works.
You can't have a battle of wits against an unarmed opponent.
What a load of toss. Linux users don't have a "moral objection" to paying for things, far from it. Apple users are known for paying for goods with ridiculously high margins because they've convinced themselves that their kit is "higher quality" than what the proles use. Or something. Nobody uses Macs at work anyway so they don't get the opportunity to warez stuff.
I mean come on. It's pretty simple - Macs are only bought by an affluent section of the market that places a great deal of importance on "lifestyle tech". This is simple market dynamics - stupid stereotypes of what non-Mac users think or do just shows you to be a fully paid up drone.
There are three types of people posting on this thread.
1: The cheap bastards who at no price except for free, will music be cheap enough. These people are impossible to satisfy with a realistic business model.
2: The vast majority, who just care about price. DRM is acceptable as long as it's wussy and if the price is cheap enough, who cares. A little bit of inconvenience due to DRM is no big deal if the price is low enough (and mind you, the DRM on these AAC files is pretty wussy).
3: A loud minority for whom a purchase from the iTunes store is a political one, that feel supporting any DRM is supporting the powers that be, the music industry, the RIAA, etc. These are the types of people for whom any purchase can be a political statement. The types of people who berate you for shopping at WalMart or eating a hamburger because it supports the corrupt meat-packing industry. They have a point, but they are in the minority ... most people don't sit and go through a checklist trying to figure out which product is doing the most harm to which people before they go out to the grocery store and shop.
The money is at #2. #1 will never be satisfied and #3 will never shut up. Go get the money, Apple.
...I see your point, but I do recall an article (Time mag?) in which the head of Warner Bros. said the delay on including their catalog is purely technical, and that the business and legal terms are already agreed.
This doesn't cut out the retail link though. It simple eliminates your local record store and replaces it with Apple.
If people get used to this kind of thing, they're much more likely to purchase music from independent artists someday - because independent artists will probably never be able to afford to get their CDs into record stores, but it won't be too much trouble for them to get onto download services.
Sure, assuming Apple don't end up with a near monopoly. This kind of thing suffers a classic network effect - can you see people joining 20 or 30 different download services to get their music? No, they'll use the ones that are most convenient - ie the ones that are integrated with their computers. I don't know for sure but I'd bet a lot that Apple won't be allowing eMusic to plug into iTunes anytime soon.
Right now the price Apple charges for getting a track onto this service is about 30-40 US cents, something around that figure. If they become a dominant middle man, who's to say that Apple won't start putting on the squeeze to up the margins just like the big bad old record companies did? They are all shareholder owned at the end of the day.
I see what you're getting at, but the topic is why Apple is allowed to integrate browser-like features into OS elements and bundled apps, while Microsoft gets slammed by the DOJ for the same thing. The answer, as stated above, is that Microsoft is a dominant in the relevant marketspaces, while Apple is not. The activity of integrating browser features is not illegal per se -- Doing so as a means to stifle competition when you are dominant in the market is illegal.
If it's crap, then why are you breaking the law to download it?
Either you like it, and want it, and recognize the value in its production and distribution, and should pay for it, or you find the music valueless and should not want to spend any of your time/effort/bandwidth downloading it.
If it's on your computer, and you put it there on purpose, you should pay for it.
Yeah, yeah, I know it's a funny joke on Mac whores, but, as a Mac whore myself, I want to let everyone know that Mac whores like me overpay for stuff because we are trying to convey positive reinforcement to Steve, so Steve will keep rocking the boat and pushing this fucking boatload of bozos (i.e., the 'technology industry') forward. Personally, I'm fucking sick of hearing about Bill G's nice house and bank accounts, and Larry Ellison's Samurai fixation. I'll put too much of my money in Steve's pocket just so he keeps lighting fires in Silicon Valley. Can I get a fucking WITNESS?!
Name your own price for songs. I wonder which tunes would command the highest prices?
When I dropped by the Aple Store in Dallas last week to get my iBook serviced I was talking to the mac genius about the iTMS, iPod, and other stuff. He said that they have been getting calls literally all day from independent artists that want to get their music on the service.
I think it'd be great if that did happen: if people could get their music on the service by bypassing the record companies and the RIAA. It would practically make Apple into a music company without having to buyout Universal.
Well, i128-bit AAC is not low-quality to me. I've actually listened to the songs and they sound just fine. YMMV. Have you purchased and listened to the music yet? If not, you might be surprised.
Secondly, the albums are priced at $10! How the hell can you people not know this yet? There are hundreds of posts pointing out that you can buy albums as a whole for less than the cost of buying all 10+ tracks individually! Learn the facts before you criticize!
The files are a copy of a copy? Actually, they're digitally remastered versions of the songs, specially made for ITunes MS. Besides, even if they were a copy of a copy, a digital copy is perfect and suffers no degradation in recopying, so I could have a 1000th generation copy that's as good as the first.
As far as the restrictions go, there are none that I actually notice. I can burn as many CDs as I want, listen to my collection on my computer, my ipod, and my girlfriend's computer and ipod. Since I think p2ping music is immoral, I don't care that these are useless to kazaa users.
My ideal is also cheaper and higher quality, but that doesn't make this a great service. It's worth it to me. The only thing I find really troublesome is that if you haven't backed up your computer and it crashes, you (apparently, I'm not sure on this) can't re-download purchased tracks for free.
There are about 5 billion burgers sold each year in the US -- Suggesting a subsidy of $55 Billion.
The total governement agriculture budget in 2002 was $18.6BB, which means the chicken, hog, wheat, and soy bean producers are being completely ripped off!
Heck, McDonalds and Wendy's together have about $4.5 BB in revenue (yahoo finanace), including international sales.
Bottomline: your statistic makes no sense.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Ok I didn't really make my point clearly in the first post.
Everyone is quick to claim this project is a success. I'm taking a wait and see attitude. Sure, it's nice to see people spending money on a legal on-line music distribution system, but I wouldn't call it a success until most of the people that use other systems illegally migrate to paid systems like Apple's.
I still have a hard time believing people that use the windows based file trading systems for free will stop that practice in favor of a system that costs money and distributes the music in a more restrictive format.
-ted
I think it's worth noting that this music store is exactly the sort of thing Apple does well, and which makes being an Apple denizen such a joy. Xerox makes the GUI, Apple turns it into a product. Airport was already around. Apple made it easy. And there were many many MP3 Players out there. Apple didn't even write iTunes. They just morphed Sound Jam into it. And here we are again. As a mac user, I've come to smile whenever I hear Apple will enter a new market. I know they'll get it right, or close enough. It took three versions for iTunes to win me over completely. Wait till the Music Store grows a bit. For now, it is a frighteningly easy to use system. Apple is a company that excels at packaging, and that has made all the difference.
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to do it by not dying." -Woody Allen
So I ran the output of the original and the re-ripped Cd through a signal analysis package. there as an 11% rms difference between the wave forms. that's pretty huge certainly well above a pyscho-accoustic threshold. (that's about the difference a carpeted room versus a hardwood fllow can make. and easily noticed on ear phones.
also the specta were slightly differently shaped. at the high end. you can hear that.
also the original ACC had no content above 15.5Khz. that's no CD quality though with my ears its hard to hear the difference. It does however mean that when you re-rip you will unvoidably erode the spectrum further, and into a range I can hear.
thus re-ripping a CD is NOT the answer. its not the same as buying something at the music store. so its critical that I be able to play the originals on various devices.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's a ripoff, like everything else in corporate america. If I pay a dollar a song, that's roughly the same price I'd pay to just buy a regular CD. I have to go to the store or buy it online, but I have the entire song, 320 kbps, and I can copy it, rip it burn it ad nauseum. These apple non-mp3s are about the same quality as an MP3, but I don't have nearly the flexibility of FAIR USE.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Very few people have mentioned this, and I think it bears notice.
The sales so far only represent Mac owners in the United States.
How much larger is the Windows user base? We're going to have a Windows version later this year.
How much larger is the international market? Apple's going to start taking International sales soon.
On top of that, Fortune magazine reports that Apple is in talks with AOL to have iTunes be the official music player/music store of America Online. How many more sales will that be?
We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg, folks.
Sample rate is 44.1 kilo sample per second. (KHz)
Bitrate is 128, 256, etc kilo bit per second (kbps).
These two has absolutely nothing to do with each other. You can have MP3 files with 44 KHz sample rate and 96 kbps. Or you can have 11Khz with 320 kbps.
The only thing that you can definitely tell is if any of these numbers go down, the sound quality suffers. Example:
44.1kHz, 128Kbps is better than 22KHz, 128kbps
and
44.1kHz, 256kbps is better than 44.1KHz, 128 kbps.
Think about it this way:
The horsepower rating and the torque rating of an engine is not related (per say), but it is "stronger" if both of those numbers are high, right?
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
Feel free to steal it!
No link is necessary, but please leave my name in.
aka It's all about the Back Catalouge. This is not just a business model for an era when promotion aside the costs of recording and distributing music have dramatically shrunk. We are entering the _th decade of recorded music. With that much music out there and a global market it makes more sense to charge a dime a tune. Or at the very least charge this rate for the older music. It will encourage people to expand there musical boundaries. Copyright aside why pay the same for a 30 years old Door tune as the latest Dave Matthews song? Perpetual copyright doesn't encourage anything but sitting on your arse on a beach and collecting money for something you did eons go. My point is that not only will they sell more music with a lower price point,but as the body of recorded music grows you will have no choice but to sell for less.