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Apple Sells Two Million Songs in 16 Days
burgburgburg writes "According to Apple's latest press release, iTunes Music Store has sold over two million songs in the 16 days that it has been open. Quick calculations show this is around 1.44 songs per second. And as was the case last week, over half of the songs purchased so far were purchased as albums. Over 4,300 songs were added to the system yesterday, including older catalog stuff (Doors, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus), new albums (Cold, Lizz Wright, and Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs), prerelease tracks (Michelle Branch, Da Brat, Jesse Harris and Kenna) and more."
I hear that some euros have put together a method for using the iTunes store already. This tomfoolery, along with comments from Sony Music that they don't want Windows users to have the same freedom as Apple users do now, makes me think that the RIAA is already getting cold feet, despite the money.
Europeans are too smart, and the RIAA is getting nervous because they don't have control over all those Montenegrins, Serbians, and Andorrans.
When all those German techno records starting moving to the top of the store, Steve Jobs new there was a problem. He put on his best black turtleneck and headed for the server room, but when he looked in the mirror, he realized that he was Dietre from Sprockets.
Man! That was a weird dream!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Also, they still only have part of the Cibo Matto album "Viva! La Woman," and have only two albums from They Might Be Giants.
But it is getting there. I'm very pleased I was able to download Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" without paying for the rest of the album, which frankly sounds exactly the same as their last three albums, only without the novelty of being fresh and new.
Once the Apple catches up stocking the stuff I just mentioned, then maybe they will move on to the more obscure bands and indie labels.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I can give you one data point.
128 bit ACC ->AIFF -> 128bit mp3
produces 11% RMS distortion of the original waveform. enought to hear.
on the otherhand
128 bit ACC -> AIFF -> 128 bit ACC
produces 6% RMS distortion.
I have not yet tested higher bit rates for MP3. however I would be surprised if 6% was not an aupper bound. This is not a pyscho acoustic test, merely an RMS test. 6% is quite acceptable for most listeners since a change of speakers or room can produce a simmilar effect. what is not clear is how this affects sounds humans are espically perceptive too such as the crach of symbols or noise in quiet passages.
Finally I have made an intriguing observation. I compared the AIFF I got off my CD to the ACC-> AIFF I downloaded from iTunes Music store. interestingly, the waveforms are not only different but the Pitch isdifferent. that's right the music plays just slightly (imperceptibly) slower on the iTunes version. I'm not sure why. Are not CD's digital, and if so what could cause the rate of playback to change. (were talking millseonds per second shifts in rate of play). It's also unlcear why the waveform of the ACC I purchased and the one I generated off the CD differed in ways besides pitch. The difference was larger than the difference between MP3 and ACC encoding using itunes. this suggests that the en-codec that apple is using is not the SAME one as the one found in itunes and introduces considerably more distrotion than the one found in itunes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Like Coldplay's Parachutes album. It's priced at $11.99 -- WTF happened to 9.99 albums? But it's only 10 songs (one of which is a whole 46 seconds long). OK, so buy them individually. Sorry, nope. Track 10 is marked "album only." The other Coldplay Album is 10.89 for 11 songs, basically the price per song.
Now perhaps the record labels are forcing these limitations on Apple. Maybe they are the reason that a CD of 18 songs is for some reason missing one track and available "partial album only" so you have to buy all remaining 17 songs at 99 cents per. I mean, how can you sell some albums like Dream Theater's Scenes from a Memory or 6DOIT which are complete album-long epics and offer it as "partial album only?" Heaven forbid I get 70 minutes worth of music for only $9.99. If you sell little 3 minute songs you can get over 20 songs on a CD that way... That's less than 50 cents a track. Oh my guiddy aunt, can't allow that.
(Maybe I *will* go back to aquiring my CDs the old fashioned way after all... Maybe the record labels want that to happen. Maybe they want iTMS to fail. Maybe I will fail to clarify what I mean by "old fashined way" with respect to aquiring my CDs.)
As everybody probably agrees, this is a great step in the right direction. This is exactly the kind of system that will bring "MP3s" (i know they're not MP3s, but that's what everybody actually means when they say "digital audio" or whatever) to the masses, legally. However, there are a few problems.
These songs are all AAC. Now, a good deal of the "new" or "lesser-known" formats that Apple has picked up on, they've turned into pretty much ubiquitous formats, for all systems. So, the fact that AAC is largely unsupported by most media players, hardware players, and other audio utilities is only going to be an issue for a little while. Once Apple has propogated AAC all throughout the PC world, it'll be just as popular as Vorbis or MPC. But there are several problems with this. Number one, as everybody knows, it's all DRM. That means that i'm paying just about the same price as a retail CD (or probably a little less, but not much), but i can only play those songs on approved hardware. (I haven't read up on Apple's AAC DRM scheme, but i assume it's much like WMA's.) So that's one problem. Another problem is, AAC is lossy, and not everybody likes it, for that reason and others. If i'm paying for a song, i want it in full, crystal-clear, lossless quality, so that i can encode it into my lossy format of choice, in order to make it compatible with my desired hardware/software. Or, at least, i'd like the option to (i understand that not everybody wants to download a full lossless CD). Of course, if they ever did go lossless, they'd have to get rid of the DRM (or it would be mostly pointless).
But i think, realistically, everybody knows that that's not going to happen. No matter how far the music industry goes with this, the music will ALWAYS be DRM. There is never going to be a service that offers just plain MP3s/Vorbises/FLACs/WAVs/<insert desired audio format>. It's always going to be restricted-access media, because the RIAA can't bear to let their content go freely to the user.
In other words, it's a step in the right direction, but i think it's the last one.