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Windows iTunes Sells A Million Songs In 3.5 Days
ajkst1 writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store has sold 1 million songs since its release on the Windows platform on October 16. Also of note is the 1 million downloads of the iTunes music program itself. When the iTMS was first released, it took a full week to sell a million songs. The store has now had 14 million songs purchased and downloaded since its original launch in April."
looking at the napster site i can see why it is so important that itunes be the standard. (check out the partners bit)
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
If I don't have a mc, windows, or an ipod, am I left out in the cold?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Expect iPod sales to soar into the holidays. Apple made something very difficult seem very simple to the end user, and now they're being rewarded.
From my understanding, because at macrumors.com, some people were a little confused, is that the Windows version of iTunes had 1 million downloads and as a result iTMS, had sold 1 million songs in 3.5 days. They wern't specifying specifically that Windows users downloaded 1 million songs.
>> Windows iTunes Sells A Million Songs In 3.5 Days
Incorrect.
Fact: There were 1 million downloads of iTunes for Windows.
Fact: Between Windows and Mac there were one million songs in 3.5 days.
but if you read it carefully it just says the 1M are "by iTunes users," i.e. including existing Mac users.
one of the problems I have with the service is that album pricing can be a bit uneven. There are too many albums (ex: NWA's greatest hits) that have an "extra" song or two added to them that then are not available for the $9.99 download because, well, you'd be getting MORE than just the album. (In the NWA case that's BS, but whatever.) Also, new albums (such as Snoop's Paid the Cost to be the Boss) don't always sell for $9.99. When I went to buy Cost a couple of months ago, it was $17 or $18. That being said, I've probably purchased $80 or so worth of music since iTunes 4 came out for Mac. Best purchase so far: Placido Domingo's album of Mariachi music.
anyone got the stats on how other file sharing services stack up to iTunes? I bet iTunes is no where close.
-Seriv
Actually there is a good reason to click. They measure interest in the story (in part) by hits to their PR.
Come play Moral Decay!
dont think anyone from Canada downloaded many of those 1 million songs from the last 3.5 days.
I downloaded iTunes on Wednesday and used it to buy an album that night. Even though I'm on 56k dial-up, it downloaded flawlessly (although it did take about 4 hours, as I expected). I have to say that I'm pretty impressed - for a free jukebox program, it's really high quality. It still has some issues and bugs that could be polished out of it, but overall it's a well designed and easy to use program that I have no major complaints about. It's heads and tails above Windows Media Player 9, and a better jukebox than Winamp (although I think Winamp is still a better standalone player). If Jobs can play his cards right, this could be big.
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
not sure what you're talking about...
I've found 5 albums
"Raising Hell", "King of Rock", "Back from Hell",
"Run-D.M.C.", "Run-DMC: Greatest Hits"
Yeah, according to Microsoft's David Fester iTunes is rather limited in it's music selection. From this article:
Unless Apple decides to make radical changes to their service model, a Windows-based version of iTunes will still remain a closed system, where iPod owners cannot access content from other services. Additionally, users of iTunes are limited to music from Apple's Music Store. As I mentioned earlier, this is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device," said Fester. David, that is.
So, Windows users expect choice in music etc more than others ?
I hope every one isn't posted to the front page like when iTMS first came out.
Seriously, I think iTMS for WIndows is going to be much bigger than most people have given it credit for. M$ can dismiss is all they want, but unless they have something better to offer I'm not seeing much viable competition. It amazes me that after Apple overwhelmingly demonstrated to the marketplace that customers don't want subscription fees or cutthroat DRM, there are still companies out there trying to make those business models work. Oh well, meanwhile iTunes will rise to the top fast.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
I wonder how worried MS is by this, as it certainly is proving popular. It is potentially a strong foothold in the market for Apple, and knowing how Microsoft likes to get it's fingers in as many pies as it can, you've got to know they're going to decide they want a slice of this one soon.
So, do you think Apple can hold out if Microsoft decided to bundle "Miscrosoft Music Store" in the next version of Windows Media Player? Would people bother to download iTunes to use iTMS, or would they just use what was put in front of them? Comes down to marketing too I guess...
It will certainly prove to be an interesting fight.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
slashdot -- old news for nerds, now with twice the repetition! Now with twice the repetition!
I don't think saving $2 on an album is that great of a bargain when the compression is lossy and you factor in the cost of disc and jewel case.
Quicktime and iTunesHelper are both loaded at computer startup and happily sit in the background, guzzling memory (iTunesHelper is 3 MB, for example). Does this crap really need to run when I'm not using it?
Arbitrary restrictions on burning a playlist (10 burns, then you have to mess with it to burn more) seems a bit silly.
That said, I do like the store browsing, and getting 30sec of good quality samples on the music is pretty nice, although I'd prefer full song at low quality (might be a problem with Audiobooks, but they've proven they can differentiate the two.)
At this point, I'm going to stick with buying used and ripping the stuff into Windows Media Player. The interface is better, it doesn't automatically suck memory when I'm not using it, and the visualization runs at more than 3fps.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Apple's innovative and patent-pending online "Allowance" feature which allows parents to automatically deposit funds into their kids' iTunes Music Store account every month;
Yet another worthless, obvious patent. Sigh.
I see a song on an album, buy it, think it's cool and have to buy the albom for another $10....there's no way to reconcile that you've already paid $1 for the song.
Oh, and streaming rendezvous(sp?) from onr machine to another borked the firewall/router/basestation/toaster so hard I had to go power cycle it...but I can't blaim iTunes without a little more testing.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Troll?
I mean, sure good analysis and point about bandwidth. But hey, iTunes music store is as much about exposure for Apple and selling iPods etc, as it is about profit.
the following URL should take you to run-dmc if you have iTunes installed:S tore.woa/wa/ viewAlbum?playlistId=806044&selectedItemId=806 025
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZ
Praise be to Apple and Steve Jobs for figuring out that there is a better way to distribute music in this day and age.
/. have an indie band, and have you tried to deal with iTunes? Any experiences/comments would be most welcome...
Once I get my finances situated, I'm off to download iTunes and get started. It's about time that someone realized that yes, there is in fact a good online music business model.
Now, how to go about getting them to sell my band's music on the store? Since we don't have a label, the split of sales would be a bit different, I'd assume there would have to be a different deal structure worked out. Does anyone else here on
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Well for only a few days that ain't half-bad, I really love the system they've got going in the iTunes Music store, I dun think Napster is really gonna use it's "huge market potential because of brand recognition" as much as ppl think, more like "wth, you have to PAY??", unless napster pulls some very nice stuff with their client, iTunes should stay ahead of the game(hopefully).
only wish they would break the country boundary (yes I know that's not easy)
You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect. Miyamoto Musashi
Burn the mp4's to a CD-RW and rip the CD as MP3's (of whatever quality you want). No DRM problems.
Is something wrong with mine? It keeps telling me it can't connect to the store because it is busy.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
The more I think about it, the more clever it seems.
So you can get iTunes for free. Ho-friggin-ray. And you can rip MP3's to your hearts content, so they work with *all* MP3 players.
Wait - Windows Media Player rips to WMA by default. Oh, it does MP3's, but you have to pay more to get it to work better than crap.
Ok, so what. Yeah, it's a good app.
And it lets you burn CD's - music and data, right from the playlist.
For free.
And all the other machines in the house - they can stream off that, so I just put all my MP3's on one box, put iTunes on the other computers, and stream from there.
Ok, that is kind of cool. Check out the online store. You know, I've only wanted to buy 1 song off this album. Cool - I just did. Only cost $1 - that's not too bad.
And I can burn it to a music CD, or put it on 2 more machines.
Then comes the fall. You know, I wanted to get an MP3 player anyway. For some insane reason (you had an additional $300), you get an iPod.
Don't need a Mac, and it works just fine with your Windows and iTunes.
But hold on - turns out you can use this iPod thing with digital camera and upload the pictures to the iPod, and from there to the computer. Oh, but you need a Mac for that.
You know, what do I use my computer for? Email, a few games - huh, that Aspyr company is porting over the ones I really like anyway -
Man, and this other stuff comes free with a Mac - a movie editor, a browser that blocks popup ads by default, there's less virus problems -
Hm....
Now, I don't think everybody will consider gong to the Mac just because of the iTunes store.
But having "hip 20-to-30-somethings" tell us how switching to the Mac is "the bomb" really didn't work.
So Steve Jobs is changing tactics: Go ahead, take a bite of this apple. It's free! It will just give you knowledge! Or, barring that, a pretty kick ass music player!
Next thing people know, they realize that they've been living naked under Windows for a long time, and start to make themselves aprons from leaves.
In this case, by plucking them from the Apple tree.
I'm curious to see what will happen from here. Remember: Apple doesn't need to dominate the market. It already makes a profit with its products now, and it happy to do so.
This will just give it the chance to make more profit - and maybe show people what they've been missing along the way.
Of course, this is just my opinion - I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
It seems that Apple's taught the world to "iTune".
Giving everyone iTunes is the choice of the next generation.
I can't decide which cola provider they should have gone with. Oh well, as long as Brittney isn't singing with an iPod I think I can deal.
Dammit my bad I searched for Run DMC instead of Run-D.M.C or Run-DMC...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
I'm not surprised by this release. I would think that there is a massive amount of built-up demand among Windows users for the goodness and convenience that is iPod and iTunes.
Personally, I'd love to be able to scan music online and get what I want. Until now, that usually meant some website or some questionable methods. Both options don't really float my boat 'cause it isn't a service designed for the distribution and enjoyment of music, as in from finding it, obtaining it, listening to it, and storing it for future listenings using a single method.
Now that Apple has show the world that not all online music listerns are 1337 k1dd13z, maybe we can continue with these developments, and we can stop hearing some organizations whine.
Yeah, I know they only got their licensing agreements because of their small marketshare but this is the kind of hesitation that is costing the music industry huge amounts of money. If they'd jumped in with both feet, they could have revolutionized (even more so) music distribution.
Instead, they insisted on going with Apple's 2.something percent marketshare as "an experiment" to see what would happen. Even a 12 year old could see what would happen if it worked. Copycats would pop up with inferior products. The first major lookalike for PC people was buy.music with all its irritating restrictions and inconsistant licensing.
People who got burned by buy.music are less likely to try the itunes store now that it's finally available to them. Sure, Apple sold a million windows tunes twice as fast as their first million mac tunes but that's not nearly as many songs as they should have sold. Would have sold if they hadn't crippled their launch earlier this year.
People wonder how a company with such great products can have such a small marketshare. This is the reason. They put out their incredible, groundbreaking products with technically unnecessary restrictions that force them into a tiny niche market while less conservative companies toss out cheap knockoffs for the mass market.
I'm glad I don't own a part of Apple. I'd be depressed that my investment could (should) be worth so much more.
Except that it's totally different. The dot-com days were typified by huge numbers of venture capitalists, stupid ideas, and fly-by-nite products. Apple is a huge company (yeah, yeah, they're dying just like *BSD, we know, we know) with a lot of backing, and they have other products for sale which they do make a profit on.
Also, how do you know they're not making a profit from iTunes? I haven't seen any figures on what the licensing costs. I'd imagine they must be making _some_ profit on it - they're not stupid. They don't need to make a huge profit, since like I said before, they have other sources of income (AlBooks, anyone?). They can break even and still be in good financial shape. But I suspect they're not even close to being in the red.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
They make about $0.33 profit out of every $0.99 sale. That goes to pay for servers, development and, of course bandwidth. But the iTunes Music Store is also a huge ad for an iPod, which they make a lot on too. Apple is doing just fine with the money they're making from the music store. According to NPR their stock price has doubled between the launch of the iTMS and the Windows release.
Errr... I mean Apple and BSD are dead.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Apple is doing the reverse. Selling the "software" (or music in this case) for cheap while (hopefully) profiting on sales of iPods and iPod accessories.
It would be a PR bonus if Apple is using it's own XServe dogfood to handle the iTunes traffic (and Apple made some noise about it).
I dont think I will use the iTMS for full albums. I am still to attached to tangible cd's and such. They are just nice. But it has proven PERFECT for one hit wonders and such....
I used to rip all my cd's and then go on gnutella to grab the few tracks that I don't own but listen to all the time, or single songs from artists who I generally dislike (i.e. Lose Yourself by Eminem) - now I just buy those songs for 99cents from iTMS, avoiding the "must buy a full cd" syndrome that always stopped me before, and suddenly I own every song on my computer for just a few bucks.
In fact, the iTMS taught me something that I hopey the RIAA will learn one of these days: Good Karma is fun.
It looks like people do want to pay for their music... if only you'd damn well make it reasonably attractive for them to do so.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Is the prices on the older tunes. There's no way in hell anyone will pay buck-per-song for the older shit if you can buy a real CD for 3 bucks.
So whats your point? There are certain stores that sell an item at almost no profit just to get customers in the door to buy other things. In the case of apple. It means that millions of songs being put out in the AAC format. Combine this with the iPod and iTunes and people in the windows world are using apple products. Makes it that much eaiser to lure people over to apple.
On one hand I am happy that iTMS [which I believe has the best compramise between protecting IP owners and Fair Use] is successful. On the other hand though, the money made is going to the RIAA - who, we all know, have been systematically attacking our Fair Use rights.
I hope that this is another Boston Strangler episode of the music industry. I hope this shows the industry that people will pay for products that are accessible and easy to use. Corporations follow the money train, and I think iTMS is it. [imho]
Please email all complaints to root@127.0.0.1 and the issue will be dealt with in due time.
the RIAA is not taking nearly all of the 99 cents, apple doesn't get more than half, but they get like 40 cents per song. They have sold over 14,000,000 songs since april. The article is about the boost in sales that they got releasing on windows. They have sold 1,000,000 songs in 3 days, when they initially released it took 7 days to sell 1,000,000 songs, and they've been averaging 600,000 songs per week, now with windows its quite possible they will sell 2,000,000 songs in a week. Thats almost a million in profits, there is no way the bandwidth cost a million bucks.
The only problem with ITunes is that it uses MP4 files (DRM'ed). If they changed the format to MP3, I'd buy it in a second. Until then, Kazaa it is...
Then you're going to be using Kazaa for all eternity. There is no way in hell that the RIAA is going to permit you to download unprotected songs.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
Apple readily admits that they don't intend to make money from this. from an MSNBC article: "But Jobs contends that in the long run the competition will boil down to Apple and Microsoft. "Between the license fees and the credit-card charges, there's no money in online music," he says. For Apple, the payoff comes in selling the iPod players that work hand in hand with the store: more than a million have been sold, and in the last quarter, Apple moved 336,000 units." link is here
patent-pending online "Allowance" wait I am pretty sure my parents gave me an allowance when I was growing up, now it wasn't online, but, or is it ok to have patents on stupid stuff if you are Apple?
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
yeah, but this really isn't true- at least not for the right reasons. itunes can import all the standard formats into it's library and then into the ipod. unfortunately what their talking about is that some of the other services are using propretory drm that probably won't allow itunes to import it- this is not necessarily a downfall for itunes because with the amount of market share they currently have with the ipod and what should naturally follow with itms, the others will have to bend and I wouldn't doubt that you will at sometime in the future be able to import the other protected types into itunes & ipod.
just my thoughts, they could totally be wrong!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Don't forget - that's the point.
From what I've observed, the dot-com bubble was "we'll have content, and people will pay us advertising!"
As I've seen from the web comic market (sluggy.com, Megatokyo, Penny-Arcade, etc), the idea has changed:
We have a product, and the content is the advertising.
They make money selling books, T-shirts, posters, and the like.
Apple is using the iTunes store to sell two things: iPods, and Macintoshes.
The iTunes store probably breaks even, or perhaps even at a loss. But as long as someone says "Gee, here's this free app - I guess I can buy this $300 - $500 music device to use it, since it's so easy", Apple just made their money.
I'm curious to see what will happen if Apple can get those iPod costs down - cheaper hard drives and such. If they can get the production down to $100 an iPod, and have a range ($100 for 5 Gig, $500 for 40 Gig, etc), they will make a killing in the MP3 player market.
For now, they seem to be doing well - a 183% increase in iPod sales over last year tells us that they're doing something right.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Each month, Apple comes out with some sort of announcement that still blows me away. MacWorld after MacWorld they have new products to support this digital hub lifestyle. When will it end???
How many of you scoffed when Jobs mentioned the "digital hub"? I did. "WTF is a digital hub? The Mac already does all of these things he's talking about. Simple ways to work with your digital camera, for adding new hardware, etc" Yet they come out with the iPod, a non-computer/non-software item. And it sells like nuts. Then they sell it to Windows users. And now with iTunes Music Service, it's become quite evident Apple is interested in more than being simply a computer manufacturer. People scoffed at the idea, but one million songs in a few days is nothing to laugh at. Can't wait to see what happens to iPod sales (and conversely iTMS sales) in the holiday season.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
If you look at BullyMag's estimates for profits of iTunes: 65 cents in royalty payments. Also bandwidth, media delivery, salaries, credit card fees etc etc is another 10 cents per song. This leaves about 24 cents per song. 24 cents x 1 million downloads = $240,000. That's just from the windows downloads. If you calculate all 14 million downloads, that's $3.36 million.
Dot-com it is not. Most dot-coms didn't have ANY income, and apple gets 33 cents a song. If you subtract out some ridiculous bandwidth ($3000 a day), some ridiculous server expense ($3000 a day) and some serious support work ($5000 a day, including lawyers, digitizers, designers, etc) they pulled in over $70,000 a day for the last four days.
...
Also, considering that you'll have:
1. people who download it just to see it
2. People who want it for their existing music libraries
3. people who have it on their Mac and want it on their PC
so the sales figures aren't bad at all. Even if every person who tried it bought just one song, that doesn't mean everyone will be content with their one song. Someone out there has $2 to burn.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
If it wasn't for their fucking US-only licencing with the companies. Almost everyone I regularly talk to would make use of an international service.
No, sorry, my bad. It wasn't Apple. It was me. I admit it. I was the one who bought those songs. I just wanted to see if their servers could withstand a vicious one-man slashdotting...
It can - apparently the iTunes server's not running Windows. But I'll try again tonight, this time with my friend Chris buying the same songs simultaneously. Then I'll get Greg and Dave to help me buy whole albums at a time, and pretty soon, Steve Jobs will crumble in terror and BEG us to stop our vicious assault on their site!
Steve Jobs, I warned you - I've got my VISA, and I'm ready to
take.
you.
down.
You didn't care when I started buying iPod after iPod in an attempt to exhaust your assembly line workers in a one-man iPod Slashdotting. Well this is different. This time, I'm serious and I've upped my VISA limits. Your site is toast. Get ready to rumble!
Signed, your pal
Hackmaster Fred
APPLE had originally sued apple who promised to stay out of the music business. Now that apple is selling music like hotcakes, APPLE has sued again.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982147.asp
This is something else that will suck profit away.
Davak
Knowing Apple they have a better split for profits than 99-1. I also suspect Apple has long term plans we don't know of.
The service already provides cross-sell opportunities. Someone who is downloading music probably has time to notice on the side of the screen the nice I-pod Apple is pimping. Or how about ripping your own tunes on a G5?
Also consider that Apple pays royalties only on RIAA music, but nothing is stopping Apple from signing it's own talent and listing them alongside mainsteam acts. That's a cartel buster.
Apple can maintain its Music Store on break even until hell freezes over, because for Apple this is just an extra.
Dude, your remark should make Roxio, Real, and Buy.com shake with fear. They are the ones with the dot-com era business plan.
For Apple, iTunes Win is merely trojan for three Apple-invented technologies: Quicktime, Rendesvouz (actually and open source standard), and Fair Play.
Look at this as an innovative marketing campaign. It is clear that Apple is not getting rich out of Music sales (at least not until they reach 1 billion in annual sales).
Actually, they have sold more than a million songs. And many of the early downloads were probably Mac users like myself putting it on a windows laptop just to use Rendezevous. I would not end up buying from that Windows machine, ever.
It is an obvious corollary to Sturgeon's law:
In any sufficiently large collection of people, 90% of them will be idiots
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
RIAA's getting 70 cents per song. I googled it, so can you.
But in most cases, that 12 song LP is $9.99.
link
I agree. This editorial at ars technica looks at some of the points you bring up.
This is interesting:
Ergo, purchases only just keept pace with the number of new downloads, and there was a sizable existing user base over on the Mac side, it seems clear that far more people are getting the software but not using it to buy anything.
It would be interesting to know what the trends are like on the Mac side. Were the Mac users downloading a million songs a week? If so, then the Windows users didn't download any -- that's probably no more accurate or meaningful than the "million downloads, million songs" correlation.
It's possible to lie with statisticss, sure, but it's also possible to tell the truth -- in fact, you often can't tell thee truth unless it can be backed up with numbers. It would be interesting to see how much of a bump the Windows launch really brought, and how the trends on the Mac & Windows sides will continue to evolve over time...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
use Kazaa alone, and think how many they have downloaded in a day!!
-Seriv
Correction to above. Only lets you transfer your songs to an ipod with a format not supported by any other digital music player. WMA music files have more portable player support than that.
has anyone had problems burning to cd (audio, data, mixed) in windows? i didnt realize this until after i bought an ablum, that itunes uses its own software to burn cds instead of users choice (boohoo i want nero). it initializes the cd and buffers the songs to burn and then exits with a '4000' error.
Yep.
1. Provide a highly demanded service at a low price. Make money from every download.
2. Sell hardware that utilizes the music sold. Integrate software solutions that advertise that hardware. Make money from the hardware sold.
3. uh oh yeah, I guess this is where we're supposed to say: ??????
4. Profit
Yeah, sounds just like the dot com bust. There's no real money making happening here. All the content is being given away without any plan for making back the initial investment. Apple's really looking hard for a business model, aren't they...
Gimme a frickin' break, boy-wonder. Next time use a "Soviet Russia" troll instead.
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
This is the reason why Apple is the company they are, and that it took them to make how the world is today.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
Then you will never pay for your music. It is impossible, with the RIAA making the calls, to get legal DRM-less music off the internet.
Apple makes a great compromise. Instead of sticking your nose up at any notion of DRM, maybe you should look past the acronym into what it really means.
Being Catholic my self (but having a very good sence of humor) still somewhat found this very offtopic and unncessary.
There's got to be prior art on this one...
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I'm not sure if you are trolling, because we've been over this many times before, but I'll go over it again.
The protected AAC files (.m4p) downloaded from iTMS can be burned an unlimited number of times to recordable CDs. There is, of course, no protection on standard audio CDs, so you are free to rerip to MP3/OGG/your-format-du-jour.
Expecting legal downloads to ever be completely absent of DRM is completely ridiculous. It will simply never happen if the big 5 record labels are going to license their music. So, the best you can hope for is DRM that actually repects your usage rights. This is exactly what Apple's system, which is called FairPlay, was designed to do.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
apple doesn't give any money directly to the RIAA, it's in the contract with the labels that they take care of the artists and all other responsiblities- apple gets a clean 1/3 from each song sale with no liabilities.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Yeah, no DRM problems, only crappy transcoding problems. (Unless MP4 is layered from MP3, but I doubt it.) Give me a lossless codec (preferably flac) and I'll think about it. Till then, I'll stick with CDs, which I can rip to flac, and recode from flac to lossy-codec-du-jour.
TimeZone
I'm a PC user, but one thing I've never been able to figure out about most PC users is this: WHY do so many people run all their apps full-screen?
It totally defeats the purpose of a windowed OS.
I see people with a 1280x960 screen running maximised browsers, and it just makes me CRINGE.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
A million already despite the Microsoft rep trying to discredit the service. I wonder if anyone listens to Microsoft's opinions nowadays anyways.
Moof.
You said it, brother.
It's not ok with me. Even if they did write me an X client I wouldn't have anything to do with a service that doesn't give me plain old MP3 files to keep for myself.
I'd rather buy real CDs and make my own MP3 files.
Good point. As far as performance goes, this hasn't been an issue for Mac users given the robust UNIX underpinnings of OS X, upon which iTunes runs in the Mac world.
If 3MB is charring your behind, I'd recommend getting off it and grabbing another few sticks of RAM. It's almost free.
At this point, I'm going to stick with buying used and ripping the stuff into Windows Media Player. The interface is better, it doesn't automatically suck memory when I'm not using it, and the visualization runs at more than 3fps.
Maybe it's time for a whole system upgrade, friend. Let me suggest that you vist http://www.apple.com/hardware/...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Wow, you've really convinced me with your persuasive argument and astounding insight.
Now then, what was your problem again?
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Of course the other problem is that the people who want ipod-like devices are the ones with a lot of music - the ones with lots of CDs tend to be older and are more likely tobe able afford an iPod - the ones with lots of pirated stuff tend to be younger and can't - I suspect that iTunes helps create a sort of middle market.
But this leaves you a song in lower quality than an mp3 or AAC file.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
..So while the absence of non-Apple support for the AAC format may be a pain initially, odds are other MP3 players and player software will start to recognize such files.'If it gets any kind of traction, we'll support it,' says MusicMatch CEO Dennis Mudd.
Anyone have ANY reason to believe that the, gosh, well, ARTISTS that recorded these fine tunes will see ANY of the money that's changed hands in these fourteen million transactions??
I'm guessing...not likely.
Or, well, perhaps a handful of huge pop artists will get a small pittance in exchange for singing the praises of "getting compensated fairly" for their work.
I can't wait for the first major-label artist/band to publically ask when their iTunes check will be in the mail...
Smart playlist:
Songs not played in the last day
All songs rated greater than two
Songs not in the genre country
Check live update
GPL Deconstructed
Trolling? I don't troll. By all means if I got my facts wrong, than answer my question. Let me know what facts I got wrong, I had one thing I said that I felt needed clarified, and did so immeadiately before anyone responded. But as for factual innacuracies, your just an AC blowing hot air. And I'm the one accused of trolling.
Easy to access previews. A friend of mine recommended a band to me. Since I just downloaded iTunes, I pulled up there album and listen to a few songs. It's only 30 seconds, but it was quicker than finding a full song on Kazaa and hoping that the song on Kazaa is properly labeled.
Not only that but this propreitary service only lets you play your songs on an Ipod, no third party players supported.
You can also burn to CD, enabling you to use any Discman or other portable CD player.
has anyone tried any modifier keys while clicking maximize? On the Mac, usually holding Option while maximizing gives you the more Windowsy maximize. Apple often includes undocumented modifiers in their apps, so clicking around holding shift or option or command usually exposes some hidden function.
Right... Troll...
I got my info here and here.
The guy from ars even says he likes the system... As a matter of fact, I like the system. They should just drop the iPod only restrictions for the MP3 player supported. iPod's have been selling just fine without specific backing from a music service.
So if Apple gets $.33 on each song, and credit card and hosting (might be cheap, but still costs money) companies bite a chunk out of that for each sale, how much profit is really left? Methinks not much.
And how many of you are really going to buy an iPod just because iTunes supports it?
Right then. I'll continue trolling.
Meh? You can tranfers MP3s to your iPod, and as far as I can tell, there are a more portable players out there that support MP3 than WMA... The AAC stuff is pretty sweet, but you're not forced to use it.
No flouride in the water supply.
And as much as I like watching Steve Jobs' keynote speeches I think the whole "Best Windows Application Ever" thing is just a dumb thing to say. It sounds funny during his keynotes when he occasionally rips into Windows, but seeing it on the frontpage of apple.com just makes me roll my eyes. It's fine if he boasts about Apple software that runs on a Mac but anything else just sounds too presumptuous.
As for people calling the 10 Burns for one playlist an arbitrary restriction I really don't think it'll be an issue with most people because how many times do you really burn a copy of a CD? And as others have pointed out, you can then just copy that first CD can't you?
Kick in the Head
They don't support my extremely obscure operating system!
Yes, folks, Linux on the desktop is obscure.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
What's the average sales/day in the Mac market? Because for them it's been just another day. I think 1,000,000 - 3,5*normal, nothing special Mac sales is still pretty close to a million...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's commonly known that apple makes about $.10 per song download. Apple's profits are at about $100,000 for 4 days, and if they keep this rate that would make it roughly $9.1 million a year.
While not a landslide for a company like Apple, it is still respectable and probably takes care of the overhead.
Where apple makes a killing is on the sales of the ipod music player. Expect sales of these to go through the roof now that there is a windows client (especially with Christmas around the corner) and it's not unreasonable to expect them to sell 3 million a year.
If Apple were to only make $34 profit a unit, that would mean an additional $100 million a year profit.
Add to this the untangible values gained from increased brand recognition and respect (leading to increased Mac sales), which in turn leads to a steadily increasing stock price, it is indeed easy to see that there is lots of sales and profit.
Congratulations Steve, you have once again shown your cunning.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
My biggest issue with all of these per-song services (iTunes, MusicMatch, the upcoming new Napster) is that you are paying relatively full price for lower quality.
.flac versions when you purchase a song or album.
I much prefer Magnatune("we are not evil") who allows you to download wav and lossless
My second problem is that my tastes are rather eclectic, and using iTunes to find albums to my taste hasn't been working. For instance, I'll pick an album that I really like, and look at the "people who buy this album also buy" and discover I don't like any of their suggestions. But I don't buy much popular music, so it may work for other people.
Related, the 30-second browsing is often not enough for me. Supposedly the new Napster per-song service will allow you to preview the whole song. I know that I bought some Magnatune album recently because I could browse the whole album.
-- Herder of Cats
On National Public Radio a representative from Apple was talking about the fee structure. 99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
- 80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
- 19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic and now the 1,000,000 song statistic. This means that for those 1 million songs the record companies made $800,000 and that the artist and Apple have to share $190,000.So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing. Of course Apple has to promote the iPod, they have to pay for the software development, the bandwidth, the data storage etc and they have to split their share with the artist (who once again seem to be considered a line item expense rather than the people who produce the art and product)
Don't fool youself into thinking this is supporting the artist. The record companies are just as corrupt as ever.
The Ars Technica article missed the obvious other solutions, by presenting the closed choice of "either AAC or WMA" DRM.
1. No DRM on the stupid file at all.
2. Use an open standard DRM technology (existing, new, or open its own AAC DRM scheme M4P).
MORTAR COMBAT!
there's a ogg plug-in that's been available for the quicktime and itunes on os x for quit some time and I doubt it will take long for this to come out for the pc version now that it's available. I also wouldn't doubt that itunes will at some point in the future support wma, either natively or through a plug-in. for christ's sakes, this thing hasn't even been out a week and everyone's bitching about what it doesn't do.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Or is that not what you meant? Or maybe you were wrong, again.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
The appeal is that I can buy two good songs off of an otherwise crappy CD for $2, rather than being forced to buy the whole CD for $12+.
What possible advantage is there to this crippleware?
It's not so bad. Burn the AAC files to a CD, and rip them into MP3. Voila. (As for sound quality, I've done this and have zero complaints.)
-W
All unfair meta-mods are now being meta-meta-modded as retarded.
do we like or hate the RIAA today? Keep in mind, buying iTunes songs is supporting the people that subpeona grandmas and 12 year-old girls. iTunes sounds attractive, but I hate to give anything to people this greedy and corrupt.
So for $18,000 you can have redundant OC-3 connections (line only). Not too bad, that's only 216,000 a year. OC-3 can handle a shitload of traffic too (my co loc server is using this setup for the whole location with thousands of servers, surely a few million iTunes downloads wouldn't cause problems).
I wonder if their traffic is metered.
No, no. You mean BSD is dying and Apple is beleaguered.
Don't feed the trolls
You can't take the sky from me...
I want to be able to have the equivalent of the CD format in its entirety, and then make copies to ogg, mp3 or whatever for my portable uses. But, for permanent archiving and home playing...why buy an inferior format?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
Well, how else will their lawyers get paid? Settlements from 12 year-old girls and college students only go so far...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
[/Sarcasm]
Been three days. Mostlikely, the number of ITunes downloads will slow down, but the buys should keep going fairly well.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
It sounds lame but I downloaded iTunes just to take a peek at their advertised AudioBook collections for sale. I was hoping to pickup a bunch of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror titles for a reasonable price. But as soon as I navigated to the audiobook section, I found that they were selling each title for the full price that you would find in the stores. So I can either go to the store and buy a CD audiobook from $16.00 - $65.00 or I can download it from Apple for the same price. I kinda rather having owning a hard copy if I have to pay full price.
Actually, Apple won't start making a profit on this until they sell several songs to each downloader of the iTunes software. Remember that because it includes mp3 and AAC encoders, they've got to pay Fraunhofer $2.50 for each download (that's assuming that they're not getting a volume discount), and Dolby about 12 cents.
This is a Good Thing(tm) that may be bad news for Apple in the mid-term future.
If it only took a week to get 1,000,000 songs purchased and downloaded, vs. 13,000,000 for the Mac-only version over six months, this could be used by Apple's board and/or investors to press the company to open more of their applications and operating system d00dahs to operate under Windows. Steve Jobs' challenge now becomes being able to keep the Apple high standards of quality in a world where crashes and confusing UIs are the order of the day.
Hopefully Jobs et. al. have a plan to prevent this cannibalization of their existing software when facing the demand and the BoD/investors pressures.
Cheers!
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
magnatune. You get WAV files from the master recording. Selection is pretty limited at the moment, but it's a non-RIAA studio, and the artists get %50 of the sales.
1. Yes, iTunes Music Store uses DRM. It is a simple (and admittedly regrettable) fact that right now no major label will allow digital distribution of their content w/o DRM. To Apple's credit, they have negotiated the least restrictive DRM scheme out there, except for that of eMusic, which sells DRM-free MP3 files.(And is the service I use for that reason.)
2. iTunes != iTMS. Once again: iTunes is not (just) an online music store. It is primarily a jukebox program. That's what I use it for -- I wouldn't buy from iTMS, since my player doesn't support AAC and I don't much care for DRM either.
3. MusicMatch is a terrible piece of software. Ditto RealOne. WMP is decent, but it scares me. A lot of people think Winamp is the bee's knees, and I admire it and its developers, but I've never quite cottoned to its playlist-oriented (rather than library-oriented, for lack of a better term) interface. So iTunes works for me, as an MP3 jukebox. YMMV. I guess Windows users do like choice, after all.
:wq
If you like the company or not it is hard to deny that Apple has done almost everything right. In the last couple of years they have:
1. Adopted open standards
2. Used and contributed to open-source programs
3. Brought music to the net (legally and successfully)
4. Brought their hardware up to x86 speeds
5. Brought UNIX to the desktop
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Of course, MS-esque marketing will probably decide which crippled alternative will dominate.
AC comments get piped to
Short term sure, but imagine a couple of years down the road if Apple gains significant mind share as the place people get music from. I'm pretty sure if that scenario actually played out they could squeeze the music labels pretty well since they'd control distribution :)
For me, iTMS is starting to rekindle my interest in music. It's true that I haven't heard any new bands/artsits in the past few years that I really like, but there are a lot of older songs from the 60's/70's era (before I was born) that I catch pieces of in movies, commercials, or when I'm with my father and he's listening to them, ect. that I haven't bothered to investigate purchasing because it's a pain and I'm not sure it'll be worth it.
I would sometimes try to find songs on P2P services, but by and large I've found it isn't worth the trouble. Due to lack of sources and my slow dialup connection, it can take a week to download a 4 minute song. Plus, I feel obligated to share when I use P2P, so keeping my P2P client on kills my download and general Internet browsing capability because I'm always uploading. On top of that there isn't always a way to tell that the quality of the song I'm getting is good, the version I'm looking for, ect. Plus there's the nagging part of my conscience that doesn't like the fact that I am "stealing" a song that is, in some form, still for sale today.
I think iTMS will be successful because it's very convenient and facillitates impulse buying. If I hear a song I like, I just do a web search for a bit of the song's lyric (if I don't happen to know the artist or song name, which is often the case) and then I can do a quick search on iTunes. Within 2 minutes I can have purchased and started a download on a song that I otherwise never would have purchased and probably wouldn't ever have even bothered downloading via spotty P2P services, even if those were perfectly legit.
I don't know how many people like me there are out there, but if Apple doesn't drop the ball on marketing, and a good word-of-mouth buzz gets around... and if they can improve their song selection a bit more (my two favorite bands, the Beatles and the Smashing Pumpkins, have almost no songs listed on the service), iTMS is going to take off like a rocket, have a long ascension and stay in the air indefinitely.
I don't know if this is going to lead to "better music", unfortunately. And the RIAA isn't going to wake up overnight to realize the fact that technology that empowers the customer can be a good thing for everyone if they go about things the right way. But eventually I think things will more or less work out. It won't be perfect... there will still be music "piracy", there will still be the "draconian" RIAA trying to destroy what they can't completely control, but I think we are finally starting to move in the right direction.
Arbitrary restrictions on burning a playlist (10 burns, then you have to mess with it to burn more) seems a bit silly.
Even when some of us friends got together and decided to make our "Party Album mix" of our joint favorites I don't think we ever made more than 8-9 identical copies. And there's nothing stopping you from making copies of copies.
Seriously, I'd like to hear a credible example of when someone might legally, under fair use, need to create 10+ exact identical copies of the same commercial music. One in my car, one in the living room, one at the weekend resort, a few to some friends, a couple that got scratched, still it's far off.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
if that's the case i'm not sorry to say i'm a necrophile.
It's to prevent people from easily making 100x copies of a CD, but it shouldn't be a problem for your average home user. Alternatively, burn the CD from iTunes once, then fire up your favorite CD copying software and go crazy.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
A friend of mine pointed out... if you download an mp3 not in iTMS.. say, mp3.com or some other service, you CAN copy it into itunes and sync it to your pod.
Same thing with the nomad manager. You can point itunes and the nomad music software at the same mp3s and still use it.
So what's the big deal?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
But to make a name-based IP claim (presumably TM), Apple (records) would need to show that people confuse Apple Computer with Apple (records), thereby causing deception of consumers AND harm to Apple (records), their name or reputation.
They'll pay some small fee and go on about the business of making money - just look at the last quarter profit.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
Isn't it amazing what happens when you innovate instead of regulate?
I'm sure all the people who purchased songs did so because they were in fear that the RIAA was going to sue them, not because Apple has heavily promoted a new way to conviently acquire just the music they want.
Score: Technology 1, Lawyers 0
The keynote outlines the features (heavily covered in the review obviously), but also gives a sense of what Jobs and Apple have in mind for this.
Very interesting.
For all the comments saying "1 million songs bought != 1 million Windows buyers", it should also be noted that it's highly unlikely that all 1 million Windows iTunes downloads were from the US either. You probably have a fair number downloading from countries that can't buy music from iTMS yet.
So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing.
Doing nothing? Really? Looks like you've been smoking some good stuff lately. Music companies actually produce the music you buy off of iTMS. Apple is the company that essentially does nothing. How expensive is it to run a couple of servers and develop bloatware? It isn't, my crack-smoking friend. Now, finding good artists, recording them, and selling their music is the difficult part, and that's where the recording industry comes in.
And what happens when everybody who wants an Ipod has one? Wasn't that Palm's problem, market saturation? It's not like Ipods have a 1 or 2 year upgrade cycle, where they'll have repeat buyers. Those 1st gen 5GB owners might be looking to upgrade, but the rest are good enough to keep for a long time, or at least 3-4 years until the rechargable battery wears out.
but not nice enough.
I listen to bands like Blind Guardian, Nightwish, Genitorturers and Stratovarius. So far I see none of those available for me to buy. The only bands i noticed that i actually would be interested in purchasing were old time swing names like Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey.
Peddling mainstream stuff is a great way to get Apple to make a profit, but it will not get very much money from me.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Except you cant' use iTMS mp3's on a nomad :P . I know.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Anybody remember when Jack Valenti said this:
Permission to be smug, sir!
"Derp de derp."
"ey are selling songs for 99 cents a piece, nearly all of which the RIAA is taking back."
Important clarification: the bulk of the $0.99 goes to the record company. That record company may be a dues-paying member of the RIAA so it can be said that the money's going to the RIAA in the same way that it can be said that the money is going to the janitorial company that the record label hires to clean their offices.
Also remember that it is the record company that invested a hell of a lot of money to have the record made. A finished CD is the result of the hard work of lots of creative people who earn their living this way -- I'm not just talking about suits, but creative people who play an instrument or sweat over a mixing board or a Mac and a Wacom tablet because they love music. These people are paid by the record company, and the record company attempts to recoup its investment by selling the recording.
If you expect the record companies to sell to the online services at a loss -- it's not going to happen. Just as you would not knowingly enter into a deal where you weren't making a profit down the road, neither would a record company or any other business on the planet.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Phobos was the god of fear, you think this was named by an apple engineer, predicting the reaction of M$ when Apple had 1 million downloads in one day :)
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
Don't know if its been mentioned or not, but those million people also installed the latest version of QuickTime along with iTunes (assuming they installed it). I gotta wonder if that's the biggest jump Apple's ever had in QuickTime penetration in the Windows market.
> my two favorite bands, the Beatles and the Smashing
> Pumpkins, have almost no songs listed on the service
My wife and I had the same problem. We put our heads together and figured out the Beatles probably aren't there because (to our knowledge) they are no longer published through a label. As I understand it, they snagged back the rights to their music a few years ago. As a result, Apple will need to get a contract with the Beatles directly if they want to carry their music. I can just see it: Beatles iTunes Anthology, only $199.95! Get it while it's hot!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The patent on allowances might be stupid, but the way our laws are framed, there's no other option. Do you really want some other company to patent a stupid thing and then ask you to *licence* it from them? See how Amazon patented the 'one-click shopping' and 'people-who-bought-this-also...' stuff. The 'one-click' patent is downright stupid since it is the most obvious thing for any programmer who has used cookies.
Anyway, my point is that even if a concept is silly, it is imperative to patent it before someone else patents it since fighting a case in court to prove prior-art might end up being a costlier affair.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
"RIAA's getting 70 cents per song. I googled it, so can you."
Can you give a link that shows that this money goes to the RIAA? It seems to be the common understanding that it goes to the record company.Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
yeah, the search engine is something apple needs to improve. --crappy on suggesting near hits. so, i search for partial names (e.g., run) and then sort the results by artist/song/album if need be.
Burn the mp4's to a CD-RW and rip the CD as MP3's (of whatever quality you want). No DRM problems.
Until Apple decides to remove that ability from the software.
And man my wife is gonna be pissed when she sees the Amex Platinum bill. What could I do? I'm trying to keep my Apple stock share up...! It *seemed* reasonable to do at the time....
Glad I had lot of CDRs lying around....
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
You're new here, aren't you? :-)
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Check out the 'added this week' section. Each week they have a pretty huge list of new stuff. I'm sending them suggestions and being hopeful. :)
And that kind of income doesn't often come to 'repressed' closet basement virgins such as I guess that you are...so, I can understand your jealousy.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Hmmm...that must be why there's no Beatles albums available through the iTunes Music Store. They have some Beatles songs in various compilations, as well as plenty of covers, but not a single album.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
At least the files will be MP3. I don't have to buy a friggin $500 player to hear them mobile!
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
You need more flouride in your water.
pfft- I did the same thing!
I even tried "DMC" just in case, and it didn't match. It should, though!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Halving the period to sell X songs shows that demand has doubled. Assuming that Mac user demand has remained constant, if you subtract them out, that means there are as many people downloading songs using Windows as there are using Macs.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
You have sex with Macs?????
I dunno who it is
but it prolly is fhqwhgads.
'm curious to see what will happen if Apple can get those iPod costs down - cheaper hard drives and such. If they can get the production down to $100 an iPod, and have a range ($100 for 5 Gig, $500 for 40 Gig, etc), they will make a killing in the MP3 player market.
I don't know if the want to bring the price down... at least not yet. Remember, Apple has never, ever stated that they are a computer company for those on a budget. Apple likes to charge a lot for their stuff.
I'm sure BMW could sell cars for way less than they do, but that would destroy their image, an eventually, their business.
I think the iPods work in the same way. Apple is not going to make them cheaper just because they can.
*discontinues the TrollBeans line of troll food and they all starve*
While who gets how much money is a matter of the one-sided contracts the artists sign in order to get heard, they can make a bit more than if no one bought the album AND no one bought songs through iTMS.
I don't really feel sorry for people (the "artists") who want to sit in a studio for a grueling 3 day session to record songs written by someone else and continue to get paid for 1,2,3 or 10 year old recordings. How many of us continue to get paid three years after we did the work, no matter how hard we worked to get the job or how hard the task was at the time?
While the industry may unjustly enrich themselves on the backs of artists, the labels are the ones that do the day to day work (printing, shipping, litigating). If I could buy an album for $10, then I'd do it twice as often as I do for $15. The sum total revenue would go up, on marginal more expense.
The industry just doesn't get it, but most of the people arguing about it don't either.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
1m songs x .99 = $990,000 - $650,000 (label royalties) = $340,000. Subtract HR, bandwidth costs, etc, etc... and they are not making much at all. But, and it's a very important but, they do get to book a million dollars of revenue in a 3 day period which is pretty impressive.
As far as I've heard, NO online music service carries the Beatles. They just don't allow it. Granted, most of their hardcore fans already have their music on CD if not vinyl..
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
So what? Give it another 10 years and iTunes won't need the record company any more. Hell, artists hardly do. Now of days record companies = promotion/popularity. Rapidly decreasing recording and distribution costs mean, well, you get the picture.
But hey, iTunes music store is as much about exposure for Apple and selling iPods etc, as it is about profit.
Let's not forget pre-empting Palladium.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> No, no. You mean BSD is dying and Apple is beleaguered.
and you, sir, are persnickety
The unofficial
Right. I suspect there may be similar reasons behind Smashing Pumpkins (correction from my previous post, there's no "the" in their band name). I know Smashing Pumpkins released their last album as a free download apparently to spite to the music industry, but I don't know the whole history behind who they recorded with, who owns their songs and all that. I don't know for sure, but that sort of thing seems to be the reason a lot of artists reacquire the rights to their music or start their own labels... they don't like the way the mega music industry establishment treated them or their customers. Well, Apple isn't the music industry, so hopefully artists like this will be willing to deal with Apple so everyone can reap the benefits of a system that is largely driven by technology and innovation and at least partially outside the control of the RIAA. Of course a lot of artists are just as bad as the RIAA as far as far as being "greedy" and wanting "control" goes. If somebody decides that they won't see their songs selling for less than $3 a pop, that's their perogative, even if I might think it sucks... at least it isn't some middleman in a suit pushing that price without any input from the actual artist.
Now that my university (Baylor, home of the natzi It department) blocks most mp3 shareing apps, and even will hunt you down for useing waste, Itunes is a Godsend We can stream mp3's over the network from our 5gig+ individual archives to others I'm sure ITS will put a end to this (port block anybody?) in a matter of time any other schools noticeing a ton of people showing up in the itunes shared playlist are (as of today i count 10, and only 2 password locked, but all my friends will be on by the end of the week)
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
"Now, finding good artists, recording them, and selling their music is the difficult part, and that's where the recording industry comes in."
Of course, the artists are charged by the recording industry for the recording costs. And selling? Well, that requires promotion, which is also charged to the artists. And the finding process begins with finding artists that are already promoting themselves to a certain level of success, because otherwise, the artists wouldn't even become a blip on the radar.
Oh yeah, there's marketing work. Which the artists and Apple already do without them, but then those two folks don't have contracts with Pepsi to put Britney Spears' face on a Pepsi can in China (true, I was there and I saw it myself). Granted most folks already knew who Britney Spears was by that time.
So what's the hard part that the recording industry does again? I've got some friends who have a band, and they'd really like to know.
----
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
"I don't know if the want to bring the price down... at least not yet. Remember, Apple has never, ever stated that they are a computer company for those on a budget. Apple likes to charge a lot for their stuff."
To put it a bit less cynically, Apple tries for a profitable margin and increases features rather than drop prices (or both) when refreshing their products.
Those 1st gen 5GB owners might be looking to upgrade, but the rest are good enough to keep for a long time, or at least 3-4 years until the rechargable battery wears out.
Or until Apple comes out with the video iPod that can play mpegs and DVD images...and then ups the HDD capacity over several years so you can keep storing more and more of your DVD collection on it...or integrates a FM trasmitter so you can listen to it over your car stero without add-ons...or makes it more and more like a full-featured PDA.
They can do lots of things to create an upgrade cycle, methinks.
1) Apple blew it. They came out with iTunes for Windows too late. Ha ha hah! Buymusic.com is already there first. The vaporous Dell and Microsoft services are much better on paper than than this pathetic Apple offering.
2) AAC? Beh. Give me the open standard. Give me WMP! Support standards, Apple!
3) Black turtlenecks? Who wears black turtlenecks?
4) 99 cents a song? What, do you think I'm RICH?! Give me songs for free. Artists don't get much money when they go through the iTMS anyway, so why should I give the artists anything at all? Answer me that, man.
5) They're just trying to sell iPods. So that means that even if I get the iTunes app for free and use it, Apple is screwing me over. Yeah, they're screwing me over. That's it.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Also, how do you know they're not making a profit from iTunes?
Magic.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I assume the natural upgrade after market saturation for the audio player would be to a full media player (video support). They could also require upgrades for supporting new audio formats (which I'm sure would be marketed with upgrades in HD size so they don't look like complete assholes). They could also make the iPod a more general purpose computing device and start selling software for it like it's a PDA (OSX CE?).
Methinks, your lying or don't read too well. When you go to download QuickTime you get 4 options, one for Mac OS X, one for Mac OS 8/9, one for Windows 98 to XP, and then one for Win2000/XP with iTunes Music Store. Now its possible you didn't pause long enough to read the option print, but thats your bad. But you can read it now if you like, here.
That's very true. You can burn a song to a CD an unlimited number of times; you can burn a playlist only something like 10 times -- but who needs more than 10 copies of the same CD? I mean, other than a thief? You can easily then rip the CD to another copy and re-burn it indefinitely if you so choose, of course.
The only thing that gives me pause is that Apple's license gives them the right to change the restrictions at any time. So these "rights" are by no means guaranteed, except by the good will of Apple Computer. Which just means that not only is CD burning these tunes legal, it's a good idea... Just In Case.
They should just drop the iPod only restrictions for the MP3 player supported.
There is no such restriction. iTunes supports a plug-in system that allows other players to work fine. The menufacturers of those players need only to provide said pug-ins. Some do.
Heh.
:-)
It's listed as Run-DMC.
There are 9 Albums. You can find them by browsing.
Why "Run DMC" or "DMC" come up with nothing, when it's named Run-DMC, seems to be a limitation.
If you really care
Perhaps this interview was where you heard the 80/20 figure.
Apple has sold 14 million tracks, one million of which were sold in the past three days.
All the clunky user interface I've come to expect from Apple products under Windows, but the iTunes software makes finding stuff in the store straightforward enough that my parents would have no problems. Thumbs up in that area.
Once the service is UK-operable, I'm in. Pay, download, burn and rip to MP3, with the satisfaction of no longer having to buy whole singles or albums when all I want is one song I happened to hear and like (most of the stuff I go for isn't exactly pop, but once in a while, I'm game.) Even on dial-up the service seems as if it'll be suited to my likely usage patterns.
The levels of DRM are fine. They serve to make a point, rather than inhibit what I want to do with music I've paid to acquire and listen to. An admirable compromise.
Thanks, Apple. Now get the UK wired in!
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Every estimate I've seen has put the licensing cost at about 65% figure they have to cover their otehr costs (servers, bandwidth, coding, etc) with something between $0.30 and $0.40 per song, their gross profit from this business is probably just below $5 million so far (since they have some start up costs (like extra advertising and the recent Windows Port that won't be there again) so they probably haven't made a profit yet, but likely will next year. I didn't hear about any specifics last quarter, through Sept.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Huh? Even that link, with all of its misinformation, correctly states that the money for the sale goes to the record label, not the RIAA.
In case I wasn't clear before... I've seen all these "a lot of the $0.99 goes to the RIAA!" statements going around, when it seems to be established that it goes to the record label -- you know, the outfit that put up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover the expenses of producing the music. Not the RIAA.
The record label and the RIAA are separate entities. The RIAA is a trade group which the record company may or may not be a member of. If I belong to the Automobile Association of America and you buy my old car from me, your money went to me -- not the AAA.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
These sites have been available for years now. MP3 finder, grammy.ru - many of them. All operating completely within the laws of the country that hosts them (Russia) and in cooperation with many of the very same labels (Universal, Sony, etc) who have refused, for years, to cooperate with american web companies in offering the very same product package.
Notice how we never hear about lawsuits or the RIAA threatening to take down these "international" sites? Why do you think that is? They don't dare talk about them and let Americans know they can buy mp3 music online at a dime a pop... or even get many popular picks absolutely free, and completely legal.
It's fascinating how they can continue to make money in a country where "pirated music" outnumbers legal copies on store shelves 2:1, but swear that offering DRM free download services in the US would put them out of business.
Of course, the artists are charged by the recording industry for the recording costs.
Obviously, the recording industry is not a charity, but a business. Nevertheless, nobody forces the artists to go to a label to publish their music. The fact that they do so anyway speaks volumes about both the relevance of the services music companies provide.
Oh yeah, there's marketing work. Which the artists and Apple already do without them
Apple markets music about as much as Wal-mart markets cola beverages. They are both retailers, not marketing operations. There is such a thing as in-store marketing, but its effect is very small, especially for online shopping.
So what's the hard part that the recording industry does again? I've got some friends who have a band, and they'd really like to know.
The key thing the recording industry could do for them is get me (and others) to listen to and buy their music. I am not aware of any band that became successful (as in, the average person knows they exist) without a record label.
At least the files will be MP3. I don't have to buy a friggin $500 player to hear them mobile!
.nap format ... unless they've changed their tune, yet again, and chosen an even more restricted format. It is unlikely in the extreme that napster will be offering anything in an uncrippled format, and Apple, while incorporating some mild (yet nevertheless irritating) DRM technology, does allow to store their purchase on relatively robust media (CDR) in open formats (CDDA, MP3) which can be reripped into whatever format one desires (.OGG, whatever).
.nap, .wma, and the other garbage coming from the RIAA/M$ camp, and you do have a winner, of sorts.
Bzzt! Thank you for playing.
Napster will be releasing music in the proprietary
Contrast this with
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That's pretty dang good, except you're likening Steve Jobs to Satan (only a bit of overkill), Windows to the Garden of Eden (where everything is perfect??), thus Microsoft to God.
Which we know is crap, because, as the song goes, Our God is an awesome God.
And Microsoft isn't exactly awesome, am I wrong?
for christ's sakes, this thing hasn't even been out a week and everyone's bitching about what it doesn't do.
Get it straight - the bitching about features started as soon as it was announced. More specific bitching started the moment the first /. reader finished running the installer. ^_^
http://www.balorn.net/
?
Who has the lobbying power in washington? To even come close to parity you'd need to send more like $50 to the EFF for every dollar you send to hollywood.
It says, and I quote
"Record labels receive the other 65% of each sale."
It doesn't say that the RIAA gets the the money to the exclusion of the Record label. His sources are somewhat dubious, and rely chiefly on speculation.
Don't know if its been mentioned or not, but those million people also installed the latest version of QuickTime along with iTunes (assuming they installed it). I gotta wonder if that's the biggest jump Apple's ever had in QuickTime penetration in the Windows market.
No more crummy Apple Quicktime player.
#!/
I can think that down the road, once Apple has a lot of users using the iTMS, they will change it to a subscription based service ala iTools/mac.com to try to make up for their "missed" profit.
There's never enough when you have too little
I love iTunes, really, I do.
I have a radio stream going all day and night, and the iTMS is addictive as crack.
I have noticed some missing albums, but I'm sure Apple will have that worked out in due time.
Count me in for some paid downloads.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I presume, then, that you never bother to lock your house or car, and your files are not password-protected? After all, no lock is totally effective, and no password is unguessable.
Apple is clearly seeking a compromise between the wishes of the recording company to lock out copying altogether and the wishes of the user to perserve traditional fair use options. The nature of a compromise, of course, is that it is not perfectly satisfactory to anybody.
>> band that became successful (as in, the average person knows they exist)
I think this is a misconception. Success for all artists is not based on the "average" person knowing their name. For business-oriented artists, success could be earning enough money to give their family a good life. For esoteric-oriented artists, success could be just having the opportunity to make music.
Neither of those require that the average person know they exist. If an artist sells 1,000,000 albums, but earn $0.05 each after label fees, then they made $50,000 for maybe a year of work. If an artist sells 10,000 albums but earns $5 per album, they make the same amount without necessarily being known to the "average" person.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I am now in the process of applying for membership.
You are very right, this formula is not supporting the artist PER SE.
But give labels and artists some credit, and above all, give Apple some credit.
First off: this is by far the easiest distribution deal you can get as a smaller label. And by easy I mean clear, no nonsense and not labor or cost intensive.
Second: since Apple doesn't demand exclusivity, this is a good add-on, regardless of other distribution or obligations.
Third: not every label is out to screw the artist. The 80 dollarcent is for the label. OK, but do you know the deal labels have with their artists? It only means Apple gives this percentage to the artists, this percentage to the labels and let them fight amongst themselves. As a distributor that's only fair. To do it any other way means not doing it at all, or do you think every artist is waiting to do its own production, book-keeping, legal work, etc etc?
Fourth: this is a great opportunity for labels and artists who are aware of what they do to make more profit per sale instead of less. By cutting some of the costs, by being able to make a cheap-ass non-programming, hardly any coding music store on their own websites without all the hassle. The iTunes link creator seriously kicks ASS!!!!
Check out the stupid example I put online for my friends in Belgium: http://www.verspeelt.com/itunes/
Fifth: Apple is making a serious appeal to indies. Indies are mostly musicians or ex-musicians themselves. Maybe not every one of them is nice, bright and clean, but these are not the big Enemy of the Artist, and sometimes better equipped to give iTMS the data they need.
Sixth: OK, CD production is not the only big cost artists (or their labels) have to cope with, but it's one of the biggest.
With this distribution model, you'll still need CD production for quite a few years to come, but regardless, you need to produce your music.
studio's are expensive,
good sound technicians are expensive and artists - or at least professionals - in their own right
artwork is expensive
And being able to win part of that back with a distribution model that costs you nothing and keeps you out of the big five's grasp but with the same shop exposure is incredibly EMPOWERING.
Seventh: In a perfect world, music is free. Chicks and guys fall out of the sky every time you get horny, world-peace and happiness for all. In this world, you don't just throw away an initiative that gives a bit back to the artist and indies and makes fans happy.
I'm seriously hoping this whole iTunes thing gets big.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Why wait for them to get situated. iTunes shines in places other than iTMS - it's a full featured player/ripper/burner! Seriously, I used to be a die-hard "I don't need no steenking playlists" person - but after having used iTunes when I got my iBook, I've never used another music app that holds a candle to it.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
Well, considering that
"The iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't," Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller told CNET News.com in an interview Thursday after the launch of the Windows version of the store,
I can't for the life of me fathom why they would want their music service to be easiest to use with their own hardware.... hmmmm....
You know what?
It isn't, my crack-smoking friend. Now, finding good artists, recording them, and selling their music is the difficult part, and that's where the recording industry comes in.
Man, he may be smoking crack, but judging from what I've heard on radio the last few years, you have been smoking some really bad crystal meth!
: )
You can't take the sky from me...
"The fact that they do so anyway speaks volumes about both the relevance of the services music companies provide."
Most artists detest marketing. That's the primary reason any artist goes to a major label -- laziness.
"I am not aware of any band that became successful (as in, the average person knows they exist) without a record label."
When the major labels approached MC Hammer (who until then had been selling CD's out of the back of a van up and down the left coast), Hammer actually turned down their initial offer, because selling CD's out of the back of a van was making him more money than the contract would have. The label had to come back with a much more favorable (non-standard) contract, and he made $135 million in one year once that happened.
But don't take my word for it. Ask an artist who's been in the business for a while.
My guess is it's impossible, impractical and incredibly expensive.
Stability on W2k/XP is a lot better with all that multimedia shit.
If I were them, I wouldn't go out of my way to support a platform that doesn't support them and is on its way out.
This said, I do sympathize.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
If an artist sells 10,000 albums but earns $5 per album, they make the same amount without necessarily being known to the "average" person.
Artists hardly make any money off of albums. Concerts and other publicity events are much more profitable for them. And if you don't sell too many albums, you won't get all the airplay, publicity, and so on.
I don't know where people are getting the idea that you need an iPod if you have iTunes. I've been using a Nomad IIc flash-player, and iTunes recognizes it and works with it through the USB interface just fine. Is this some FUD or what?
judging from what I've heard on radio the last few years, you have been smoking some really bad crystal meth!
Sure, but then most of the indie stuff is even worse.
I'm not sure if this is from their DRM stuff of whatever but if i try and convert an MP3 to AAC format it is only playable in iTMS and Quicktime. That flat out sucks. The new Winamp 5 can rip cd's now to AAC by default and they play on just about everything that supports it. So why don't apple's m4a's play nice with other software?
MoRe... LaTeR... -=PJK=-
In itself, this one million is meaningless, but as an overall strategy to sell iPods and promote the Mac it's unbeatable. And they have revenues daily, no costs, unbelievable.
...
I wonder how much buymusic.com makes
I think, therefore I am...I think.
What happens is that Apple will then be sitting on a big pile of cash, that's what. How is this a problem for their business model again?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
And it still gets 400 comments. I didn't realize slashdot readers had such a long attention span.
Are we sure it wasn't just Cher downloading "Do You Believe" a million times?
Right click on the file... notice the selection "Convert Selection to MP3". Seems pretty easy to me...
today is spelling optional day.
From the Apple Q4 conference call:
137,000 iBooks shipped ($154 million)
336,000 iPods shipped ($121 million)
iPods represent almost as much income as iBooks!
Without iTMS for windows!
What will those numbers look like after this Xmas?
Hello?
The iTMS drives sales of iPods.
Apple need not turn a profit on the iTMS.
By Making-The-Whole-Widget (tm) Apple can compete against the likes of Napster, et al on completly different terms.
It fits in with their overall iApps strategy.
Expecting me to open my wallet for DRM is what's ridiculous.
I was one of the better customers of the music industry (>= 10x as many purchases as the average person) before they drove my business away. Now I avoid major-label CDs. Did I mention that the independent-label CDs that I buy come with higher quality than 128 Kbps MP3 or AAC, and no DRM?
Subtract HR, bandwidth costs, etc, etc... and they are not making much at all.
:: iPods : blades
Which is perfectly according to plan, because this entire service is essentially a loss leader designed to sell iPods.
To put it more succinctly:
iTMS : razor
~Philly
According to Apple CFO, Fred Anderson, the company quadrupled iPod sales in the last (non-holiday) quarter, selling 304,000 units for revenue of $111m.
With WindiTunes available and a holiday quarter coming up, I think we can safely say that iPod profits will go a long way to cover any operational iTMS costs.
Let me give you my experiences with the store, because I was skeptical too. Note that my experience comes from a PowerMac G5, which I've had for about a month. I've used Linux almost exclusively for about 2 years after I decided to quit using Windows.
...so they should just admit that DRM is worthless.
So you have to transcode from one lossy format to another. That's just KEEN!
What Apple should do is distribute FLACs.
These arguments never cease to amaze me. I've gone from MP3 to CD to MP3. Have I noticed a difference, sure. Was it that big of deal, no. I suspect the difference is less with AAC to CD to MP3, because AAC is better quality than MP3 to begin with. I've never tried this however. If you are such an uptight audiofile, you probably haven't made the jump from vinyl to CDs on this principle. (I enjoy vinyl by the way, but realize that everything has its place)
Just on principle, I planned on ripping all protected AAC files to CD and then to MP3 for use in iTunes. However, after seeing that I wouldn't gain much in way of rights, I decided not to. I can copy the AACs to 3 computers, and unlimited iPods. I can burn to CD for the stereo. And, I can stream it to any computer in my house and that computer doesn't use one of my alloted 3 copies.
I think in a way, they do. They proclaim the ability to burn unlimited CDs as a great feature. Some of their competitors do not do this. However, the DRM is not entirely worthless if it pursuades the big 5 to license their music, something they wouldn't do if there was no DRM.
In any case, the DRM is easily worked around, which I suspect is by design. The emphasis is on the user, quite clearly, and Apple deserves kudos for doing what others were afraid of. In turn, it looks like this is what is making them successful and the others fail.
I'd pay a small premium to be able to download DRM-less FLAC over crappy AAC.
I've done my fair share of listening in both formats. If you are actually going to suggest that AAC is that crappy, you've obviously never bothered to actually listen to it.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Both intercept and record an audio stream from inside the computer (to put it simply enough for all to 'get' the idea) and save it to the HD or RAM disk AS AN MP3 file.
Just think of the money you'll save by not having to buy blank CDs if you use one of these products.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Just to be obnoxious, the 0.33 (or 0.19) isn't profit if they then have to spend money on servers, development, and bandwidth. It's revenue, their actual profit is much lower (and at this point, still negative).
Maybe, but it won't be a slam dunk hit like the Ipod. Apple trumped the competition by having the smallest form factor for a hard disk player and the cleanest design and UI. The portable video player market is more crowded, and you'll need a bigger form factor for a usable screen. IMHO, portable DVD players at the $200 price point will be the biggest sellers. There's just no way Apple will make an Imovie for Video Ipod that'll let you rip DVDs to Quicktime.
"I'll bet the number of songs downloaded over P2P during that period was much larger than 14 million, fuckface."
I bet that detail is entirely irrelevant, dingleberry.
Now, if you're done name calling, would ya like to have a discussion about it or would ya rather try to be mr tough guy while you're anonymous?
"Derp de derp."
What excuses will you have now to keep using Kazaa and so forth? You're always rattling on about how file-traders brave freedom fighters shoving it to the RIAA by avoiding an "obsolete business model," and how record companies should instead embrace Internet file-sharing.
Well, here it is. Have you switched to this excellent, high-quality p2p file-sharing program or are you still leeching off of Kazaa? I think it's a legitimate question, because iTunes is just the tip of the iceberg with this kind of success. I'm very pleased that Apple is leading the charge.
Will you actually stand behind your ideals, or does it turn out that you've just been justifying your guilt for leeching all this time?
"Sufferin' succotash."
First off, note that I am a big supporter of independant labels. However, I question you're philosophy of not paying for DRM.
Indie labels offer thier music on whatever format is entrenched, which happens to be CDs at this time. The reason that CDs contain no DRM is that it was not feasible for the typical consumer to rip them at the time they originated. This mistake will not be made again.
Witness, for example, DVDs. Do you refuse to watch DVDs because they contain DRM? What will happen when the CD is phased out for the next big advance, be it SACD or DVD Audio, which both have DRM. It may be some other fancy new media, but be damn sure that it will have copy protection. The indie labels will no doubt distribute on the popular format. CDs will be around for some time, just as vinyl has lasted. Some records however, will only be distributed on the most popular format, for cost reasons, etc. Will you quit listening to music entirely at this point?
As an aside, the DRM used in iTunes will probably have less restrictions that that found on future formats. It is already far more user oriented that the protection found on DVD-Video. I suspect similar restrictions are in effect for DVD-Audio. I know that their are restrictions on SACD, but I do not know any details.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Here's the original text.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I certainly don't consider apple computers gay, but I do think that's the path of the latest penny arcade comic
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
So true about apple not needing to dominate the market. Right now they are in the best market position possible. Microsoft can't destroy them, can't even take them on for fear of anti-trust issues. Apple's got great profit, if this causes an increase in market share of overall apple from 2% or 3% to 5% they'll turn a billion dollars in profit.
iTunes is a huge and immediate threat to Microsoft's DRM dominance plan.
Of course this is all great, but let's not forget that Open Source (represented by linux) and Apple are allies at this early game, and I believe OpenSource will land the biggest blow.
Let's also remember, though this is a step in the right direction for the future of IP. However it's still DEFINITELY NOT RIGHT FOR THE PEOPLE.
The moment you give up freedom on your computer and your home YOU WILL NEVER GET IT BACK!
iTunes DRM is an immediate threat to my personal freedom. My freedom to own the contents in my hand and the contents within my home and I will not be buying from the iTunes music store because I will not have corporations dictate rights to me in my most personal of places and spaces. DRM, even ubiquitous as Apple's is will not come between myself and my friends and family. DRM belongs in the corporate sector, between corporations, perhaps on file sharing, perhaps between me an the masses just as I have security between myself and the masses, but not on my VCR, my TV, or my music player!
Furthermore if I want to give someone the keys to my car, lend them a CD, or invite them into my house that means I decide, and I won't settle for inviting someone in my house and having to then (because some corporation dictated it) give them individual access to these AAC files or that WMP file. I determine the rights within my home, NOT a corporation. That's fair use, and DRM is an invasion of privacy. You cannot take away someone's freedom unless that individual has been convicted of a crime in a court of law, and DRM is a guilty until proven innocent technology. You can not enjoy the content on your own computer until you prove it's yours. ENOUGH!
AAC is a good step, but ultimately a dead end, because it tackles the problem from just the wrong side of a thin line, sure it's nice now, but you're still letting a corporation determine your usage within your own home and space. What happens when they decide to change those rules!? ...and they will.
We've gotten to bound up with property because of our free market. We're commodity centric. Remember it is not about yours, mine, his, hers! It's about personal, private, and public space and boundaries. These don't all have to exist simultaneously in your house. We need to focus on regulating copyright in public space not private space. In file-sharing, not my computer!
Also, DRM on music WILL ALWAYS BE DEFEAT-ABLE. If you can here it you can record it. Always will. It's idiotic to try control copyright within the home! and will be a huge annoyance for consumers no matter what. Copyright should be controlled in the public forum. Ok, redundant, but important, but I will move on.
I don't claim to have the answers for music yet, but books are a primary example of a balance met. They have a natural state. Even if you could download every book in the world online you would still pay the publisher $5.99 for the paperback for doing any more reading than just perusing. More sales would happen in this scenario, because suddenly people in China can find out about some small time US authors new book and then order it off Amazon. Wear-as right now, there's little to no chance the publisher has publicized the book in China. Perhaps the recording industry should stop focusing so much on DRM and start looking at "adding value" to their product so it still has a legitimate reason for existing. May I suggest they start with a multimedia video/music disc that you can play like CD
I am a monkey. This is slashdot.
All I get when I try is a little page telling me that since it's not available "in your country" yet, all I can do is browse and not buy.
:)
Global commerce. Heh.
Point of the message is, not everyone who's downloaded iTunes for Windows *can* buy music from the store, even though we'd like to...
Apple will miss their goal. They sold 1 million songs in 3 days, so they'll sell 87 million in the next 261 days... reaching 100 million next June. Apple said they'd sell that many by April. Sales are low -- by Apple's own benchmark!
Despite that, I love their music store. I contributed to that 1 million sales figure this weekend. I hadn't bought any new music for three years before iTMS was launched. Now it's a real treat to browse for new music, especially in older genres (Jazz, Opera) that aren't so mainstream nowadays. Hey, just because it's old doesn't mean it doesn't rock (figuratively speaking).
WOOOO HOOO!
-Miles
Fuzzy
Apparently, Apple's invention here is that the prepaid gift card is really a single-purpose gift card (not a widely accepted credit card) and is automatically deducted from the guardian's account.
However, mobile phone plans with an "allowance" of outgoing minutes may count as prior art.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"Freedom for the world, why not?"
From whom, for whom?
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
My apologies if this has been already covered. It's clear that Apple has made iTunes the loss leader for the iPod. That is, the are bringing people in the door with the downloaded music and then (hopefully) up selling them on iPods (and Macs too). That business model makes sense when you think about the profit margins that the iPods bring. They're making at least $100 on just the low end model and they've sold 1.4 Million total units. Also, it appears that iPod sales have been accelerating since the launch of iTMS. Apple has figured out that if they sale "X" amount of songs they will probably sell "X" amount of iPods. So I think the losses from the music store are chalked up as the just cost of doing business. It looks like the loss leader is the current business model of choice for the online music stores. MusicMatch is doing the same thing (up selling to the Pro version) and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Once apple has a solid brand, the can renegociate their deal with the RIAA on better terms. Apple's proably shooting for the kind of name recognition and association with digital music Napster has. That's worth way more than short term profits, and in the mean time breaking even's ok.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing.
Oh I know! In fact, this reminds me of those damned crooks at [evil corp]. I order something from them, pay $50 for it, and UPS only sees... what, $2, $3.50 max? I mean, UPS packs, ships, and verifies delivery of everything I ordered. Yet [evil corp] is getting over 90% of the money. And for what? [Evil corp] didn't have to buy planes and trucks to deliver their wares. They didn't even pay for the boxes or the shipping labels. They did NEXT TO NOTHING... except produce the gadgets I ordered.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
doesn't matter for now; this is a paradigmatic change, not necessarily started by apple or done best, but they have launched a pretty solid piece of software into the windows world and I think it is going to take that OS's audience by storm. they are going to set the standard for this experience, to be surpassed soon enough by others; this inroad and the sales are nothing short of remarkable any way you look at it.
If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else.
_nfotxn
Apple's patents are defensive. They never, ever use them.
Oh really?
Apple hasn't always licensed its patents to free software projects:
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm curious to see what will happen if Apple can get those iPod costs down - cheaper hard drives and such. If they can get the production down to $100 an iPod, and have a range ($100 for 5 Gig, $500 for 40 Gig, etc), they will make a killing in the MP3 player market.
Uh, they ARE making a killing in the MP3 player market.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
"Also consider that Apple pays royalties only on RIAA music, but nothing is stopping Apple from signing it's own talent and listing them alongside mainsteam acts."
Actually, there is. The whole Apple Computer/Apple Music confilct (mentioned previously).
While I think Apple Music's current lawsuit is pretty baseless, if Apple Computer did get into the music label business (which would basically be what you suggest), then there would definitely be a STRONG case for trademark infringement. They would either have to pay out a huge settlement or just end the whole matter by trying to buy them out, which would be my suggestion. Think about it, then they even get their own head start on the whole label business. The interesting question then would be how that would impact their relationship with the other major labels.
fuck you.
Actually, Apple has sold 14 million tracks, one million of which were sold in the past three days.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Please mod parent up. The iTMS is a loss leader for the sale of iPods to both Mac and Windows users. Even if Apple only garner a small share of Windows users (say, 10%), that would represent a many fold increase in iPod sales.
For all the good uses alone you are not pusing the platfor. You're just giving the RIAA/MPAA ammunition to get hardware and software vendors to include this TC stuff where we cant do anything at all with the content we purchase. Such as download DVD's and burning to our own DVD's for playback in our OWN dvd players.
NO people like you will cuase it to be where we can download RIAA/MPAA content to only RIAA/MPAA approved PC platforms and copy it to THEIR approved vendor list of high priced and low functionality devices that ruin the whole experience. Thus killing off innovation and better prices.
This is not so commonly known, in fact, it's just another number pulled out of thin air.
/.
Th real number seems to be somewhere between $.10 and $.40 (disregarding the unrealistic numbers of $.01-$.05 some have thrown out. Apple may not be in the online music market to make money, but they're not so stupid as to get THAT bad of a deal...).
I think the bigger question is what's the damage to Apple's bottom line, and on that note, I think I saw it quoted somewhere that iTMS was near to breaking even, although I will admit to not being certain. Noticed I QUALIFY my uncertain statements.
So unless you REALLY know the bottom line on the what the number is, stop making things up and stating them with an air of authority. But of course, if you did that, then this wouldn't be
fuck you.
not true
iTMS files are not an open standard, but an encrypted AAC file. iTunes does however let you burn them to CD, then re-rip to MP3 if you want. However, going through a lossless compression twice (as required to get the music onto a nomad, etc.) will result in a significant loss in quality.
Minor correction:
Apple doesn't make any deals with the RIAA. They make deals with the record labels. If they had to make deals with the RIAA, then we wouldn't see any independent lables on the iTMS.
fuck you.
I know it's OT, but does anybody else having any problems deleting files from their database in iTunes? I tried to remove some moved files, and it just soared up to 100% CPU usage and locked (mem+pagefile was at 1GB of usage). Everything else works great, this is just pissing me off.
The Kingdom of Retarsia
But Apple (Mac OS X) _is_ BSD Unix, so if BSD is dying, then Apple must be too. ;^)
I much prefer Magnatune("we are not evil")
The problem with Magnatune, CD Baby, and many other self-service labels is that they don't seem to assist clearance of copyrighted songs for recording, and they don't seem to provide access to an expert witness so that a singer-songwriter can determine with some level of certainty that he didn't accidentally infringe the copyright in an existing copyrighted song by subconsciously copying it. Apparently, according to the terms, Magnatune is interested only in selling recordings of arrangements of pre-1923 classical music:
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is not accurate. The artist payment comes from the label portion, not Apple's portion. It should be obvious that the lables pay the artists, not Apple. Also, the $.80 figure is not correct, either. In fact, the labels get less than this.
;-)
The labels are doing a lot of work to perpare the content. Not only do they have to get legal clearance for the songs, they also have to prepare & QA the audio, metadata, and graphics. Apple packages the files in their DRM, does another round of QA, hosts the files, loads the metadata into the store, and manages the merchandising and sales.
It may look easy from the outside, but I can tell you that it requires a lot of work from a lot of people on both sides of the equation. Also, which do you think is easier: dealing with lawyers or computers?
I've been trying to find some classical music using the store (hard to find Ravel piece) but have been enjoying the radio feature all day (Magnatune Classical). Much nicer and less obtrusive interface than Windows Media, Dell's Joke, er, Jukebox or Real *whatever-its-called-this-week* player. I can imagine getting an iPod. So; when will OSX be available for my Dell 5150? :)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I think having a high-quality (if not technically CD quality) pre-ripped track, delivered by (normally) zippy servers with good bandwidth, and reasonable DRM is enough added-value to open the gap up again.
Until an iTMS purchased album comes with a lyric sheet, authoritative lyrics (as opposed to potentially misheard lyrics) are worth money to some people. Other people do not yet have a CD recorder. For them; the first CD purchased and recorded through this system would cost $10 for the recordings plus $50 for the CD recorder including shipping; amortizing this is left as an exercise.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Until of course the artists decide to cut out the middle man and go straight to Apple.
Of course if that ever happens Apple Records really will have a perfectly valid suit against Apple Computer, and well... Hmm...
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You can also burn to CD
My portable player is a RioVolt MP3 CD player. Can iTunes 4.1 for Windows transcode and record iTMS purchased recordings to an MP3 CD?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, since the iTunes AAC files are encoded from the masters, it all depends on whether the AAC lossy encoding or the WAV lossy encoding is noticeably different.
I mean, you do realize that digitizing an analog input is a lossy process, right?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
What are you endorsing here?
:\
Apple may be a 'fringe company', but as insignificance goes, chances are there are more people using their products on the desktop than Linux. They definitely hold more sway with commercial software vendors than desktop Linux. There's also no such thing as a 'tiny monopoly'.
In what way do Apple excersize monopoly control over any market -by manufacturing the OS and the hardware together, like computer companies always used to do? I guess you're probably too young to remember when computers used to work properly.
I don't think much of Steve Jobs, but he sure as hell didn't run Apple into the ground. He is just about solely responsible for making the Apple II into something that normal people wanted to own, which made Apple into a multi billion dollar company.
He had a significant hand in bringing the Mac to market, about the only really bad business decision he made before getting ousted was showing the GUI to Bill Gates.
Nope, the honour of nearly running Apple into the ground goes to John Sculley and Gil Amelio.
Steve Jobs lollipop iMacs and crap additions to prevent System 7 from dying are what prevented Apple from going under in the late 90s. And Steve Jobs is responsible for probably doubling the number of Unix machines on desktops in the world.
Still doesn't stop him from being a self absorbed wanker who thinks that he knows better than everyone else when it comes to what people want. The problem is that he's usually right.
Volume bandwidth prices are near $0.10 per gigabyte.
I figure so far this has cost them around $400.
I don't think they're reaching for their pocket for change just yet.
... is the RIAA gasping its last breath as its antiquated business model is finally proven completely and utterly obsolete.
You can bet that Apple will be sued over iTunes, if they have not already...
Hopefully by that time Apple's found some new "next big thing" to latch on to.
The nice thing, hopefully, about the iTunes Music Store is that once it stops being an active profit-bringer because of the iPods, it still is at least breaking even. So Apple isn't really paying any money for it to run. It's just kind of self-sufficient.
Moreover, even if they don't make any money from it, the iTunes Music Store does good things for apple. It engenders some kind of goodwill, it makes some people who might otherwise write Apple off take them seriously enough as a still-vital company they might look at some of Apple's hardware offerings, it gives Apple something they can point at and say "look at all the revenue passing through the Music Store every month, we're not going anywhere anytime soon".
Perhaps most importantly though if iTunes is adopted in a big way it makes a big logjam on the spread of Windows Media. If someone really loves iTunes, even if they don't like the iPod they'll be more likely to buy an mp3 player than a wmv player. If nothing else, this means that once wma starts trying to take off, people will actually go "wait, this DRM is really stupid" since they've dealt with what is, purely relatively speaking, a more reasonable DRM system (iTunes).
Also, iTunes is a sneakily brilliant and possibly unintentional way of making absolutely certain that almost everyone has a non-Microsoft way of viewing MPEG4s. WMV vs. MPEG4 is likely going to erupt into a rather painful war at some point, and this is MPEG4's big beachhead... how many music players do you think will add AAC as a result of the iTunes store? Maybe not many, but certainly more than there would have been otherwise..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Ooh yeah, Apple is taking all the legal download sites out behind the woodshed. It's over. We have a winner.
Ph34r indeed.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Well, I have a Windows98 box, and would use Windows iTunes if it was available for 98. Not planning to upgrade to XP or 2000 as some small amount of my software won't work then. I'd of course use Linux iTunes if that existed, but again am foiled. Oh well, guess I'll just have to buy CDs and hope I can play them...
When radio first started out, manufacturers could sell you one, but there was little to do with it. So, the early radio shows were actually financed by the manufacturers (selling advertising came much later.) The idea was they'd give the shows away and make money selling you the hardware.
It's kind of funny now because manufacturers cut one another's throats in the low-end radio market, and radio (radio shows, that is) is big money.
Apple has an interesting angle on their iPod-ITMS venture; but it's not unprecedented.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
But how would they do that? Burn a copy protected CD by default? Even if they could implement that, that would break the CD from being able to play in many players, and that isn't something Apple wants.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Question that someone should test:
Apple claims to have most of their encodes made from the original masters. Which creates a higher loss of (perceptable) quality? Master -> CD -> MP3 or Master->AAC->MP3
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You're forgetting about the gray non-entities inbetween Sculley and Amelio. There was a Cherman guy, wasn't there?
Yeah, Jobs is an asshole, but if you belong to the Cult of Apple, he's OUR asshole.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
This is only true for files over about 7 minutes long.
Look at Vanessae-Mae's classical album for a good example.
Violin Concerto in C Op.48, II. Andant (5:02) you can buy just the song.
Violin Concerto in D Op.35, III. Finale (Allegro Vivacissimo) (9:08) can only be purchased as part of the album (32 songs for $29.97).
Other songs that are album only on this:
*Violin Concerto in D Op.35, I. Allegro Moderato 17:22
*Violin Concerto in D 'Adelaide' (In the Style of Mozart) K294A1, I. Allegro (7:22)
*Violin Concerto in D 'Adelaide' (In the Style of Mozart) K294A1, II. Adagio (7:14)
*Violin Concerto in D Op.61, I. Allegro Ma Non Troppo (22:47)
*Violin Concerto in D Op.61, II. Larghetto (8:05)
*Violin Concerto in D Op.61, III. Rondo (Allegro) (9:48)
*Inspired by Folk Culture, Frere Jacques (8:54)
*Inspired by Opera, Concert Fantasy On 'Carmen', Op.25 (13:37)
*Inspired by Opera, Fantaisie Brillante On Themes from Gounod's 'Faust', Op.20 (16:21)
There's a fairly consistent pattern here and not many "One-hit Wonders" have a hit that's over 7 minutes.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
There's just no way Apple will make an Imovie for Video Ipod that'll let you rip DVDs to Quicktime.
What makes you think digital video discs are going to be around much longer than compact discs? All the Video iPod will have to do is suck down a big fat file and play it - no "ripping" required!
What apple reported, if anyone had bothered to read the actual press release, was that the total week's song downloads (from all versions of the software, windows and mac alike) had exceeded 1 million songs during the week the windows version was released. This being a rise over the NORMAL weekly sales of 500,000 to 600,000.
In other words, itunes has sold 400,000 songs more than a normal week during the week that the windows version of itunes was released.
So, let's see what slashdot got wrong:
1) It wasn't a milllion windows song downloads, it was a million total downloads.
2) It wasn't over 3.5 days, it was over the course of a week.
3) There's no word yet on what percent of that million was actually windows song downloads.
Come on guys, if you want make-believe that you're real journalists, at least do a bit of basic fact checking before publishing blatantly wrong information.
heh..yeah, but it is WAY better than what Music Match.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Quite right. And then later, they can slowly allow artists to directly deal with Apple thereby getting rid of record companies.
And in a very short while... When contracts die and new artists come up...
Ofcourse, the videos stay but then we need those.
Go here
You search a number and they generate the code to paste in your html page.
I ripped of a screenshot from the iTunes Store to show my friends that you can use text, pictures etc... It's a no-brainer, you need only a bit of html nollidj
I think, therefore I am...I think.
umm...you realise that ITMS is not meant to make them money, it is ment to push iPods.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
And it's probably time to add another category to the list of things easily used to explain the mainstream record industry's drop in sales. In addition to (1) the recession and (2) the smaller # of releases by record companies themselves and (3) increase in indie company sales, we'll have to have (4) legitimate online sales.
What's more, #4 has to be magnified: if done right, digital sales should be far more pure revenue than conventional distribution, given physical production and retailer take.
Tweet, tweet.
the diffrence is that the [evil corp] is getting the level of money tehy get when tehy have a physical distrobution and production.
the Record Lables just need to gett he treacks recorded and edited, then they send the huge ass files to Apple for encoding, packageing, placement, and shipping.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
They are definitely making gross profit from iTunes. Assuming they spent shitloads of $$$ on R&D, they might have high depreciation costs and so their operating profit might be negative. Though even with $40 mln investment figure (crazy, isn't it?) that I heard somewhere and 5 year depreciation period they still need to depreciate about 650 thousand per month. And they sell 2.4 mln songs per month to Apple users only, which makes more than that if we ignore the operating costs for the moment (They can't be high, hosting/traffic is cheap, even with lots of free streaming, as Apple gets 1$ per song). In any case, that's simply a matter of time and increasing their sales. But with Windows they must immediately become profitable. And probably very profitable.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
lets see....Lawyers do what you tell them to do, and while they might complain when you try to do soemthing that is not quite the right way to do it, they end up doing it anyway, and if you try to do something that you can not do, they tell you no and don't let you do it. then if you are realy abusive and keep trying to make the lawyer do stuff that is not quite right, they just stop working for you.
Computers do what you tell them to do, and while they might complain when you try to do soemthing that is not quite the right way to do it, they end up doing it anyway, and if you try to do something that you can not do, they tell you no and don't let you do it. then if you are realy abusive and keep trying to make the computer do stuff that is not quite the right way, they just stop working for you.
hmm, they seem almost exaclty the same.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
then Apple Computer just outright buys Apple record's trademark/business and the beetles just rename their company to beetles records or something.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Currently a compromise is necessary. But if there develops a competitive market. If people will not massively abuse potentially possible AAC-CD-MP3-P2P route. If customers will demand the non-DRM music to be able to play it everywhere. If all these things happen, then some company will try again selling DRM-free music. After all, there is that e-music company or something that sells music in standard MP3s.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
And the difference is what again? You just described exactly what I did, and what the original parent post did.
It appears you are simply letting the fact that the RIAA are a bunch of anti-fair-use assholes affect your judgement here. In my example all the [evil corp] does is create a gadget (ie. record/edit/promote some music tracks), and UPS handles the delivery (sort of how iTunes delivers prepackaged music). So again I ask, what is the difference, other than [evil corp] being in this case the RIAA?
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
. . .but you totally missed the point.
CDBaby doesn't have its own "download service" competing with iTMS/MusicMatch/etc. They serve as an electronic distributer. You tell CDBaby "here is my CD. Please place it on iTMS and MusicMatch." CDBaby replies, "we'd love to do that. we hope your band does well. You will be paid 91% of what Apple / MusicMatch pays us for downloads of your songs." CDBaby has deals already worked out with the download services letting them rip/upload music to the stores.
Here's more info about their service.
Well, MS' DRM option is completely proprietary to Microsoft, just as Apple's is to Apple. The key differences are that (1) MS licenses their DRM to other retailers so that you can buy DRM'd WMA's from multiple vendors, and (2) MS' current DRM is really annoying to use, so all of those vendors are stuck on a platform that people don't want to use. If you have to pick between "the same as everybody else" or "better than everybody else" which would you pick?
Keep in mind that in the MP3 player market, Apple is the clear market leader, with 54% of all MP3 player sales by dollars, and around 35% of unit sales. And they've sold over half of all music sold online. So I think that they're pretty well positioned...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I am just wondering how you've configured you're playlist and preferences, and if there's some kind of stuff to do, cracks to download or something else,to enhance itune. About the playlist i've made lists by decenies (starting from the 50's), lists by genre (the major ones: classical, rock, hip hop, jazz, electronic, pop, ect), and i also have "my top rated", "my worst rated" (which i haven't used yet :) "recently played" and "top 25 most played". If you want to brag do this here too. I have: 9186 songs, 26,4 days, 43,07 GB
Or maybe God is just dog spelled backwards and is really the anti-dog. This could be why dogs fear thunder, it is actually the backwards sound of God saying "Bad dog! Bad dog!"
Thank you, Dr. Science...
Sapere aude!
Ha!
;)
At least someone saw the post for what it was.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Yup and it's practically free advertising for Apple. Look at all the press they are getting. Talk about an increase in mindshare, it seems like everyone is talking about Apple and their products these days. Apple is already one of the most recognized brands out there, this will just add more fuel to the fire.
It's like the Apple Stores. The stores are barely breaking even so it would seem like they are not worth the effort but they are huge billboards for Apple and they MAKE money, not lose it. Any company would kill for an advertising campaign that actually paid for itself even before you counted in the increased sales.
Apple is very crafty and the iTunes Music Store is going to pan out big time for them.
Sapere aude!
apparently you do not know the diffrence between making a physical object and making an electronic one. not to mention the RIAA does not even pay for the studio time (which pays for the studio equipment and rent) or promotion. the artist pays for that, so the most expensive part of the job of creating music is payed by the Artist.
where as the most expenisve part of making a widget, the company foots the bill and actualy pays the workers for producing it.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
That's supposed to be labels. Damn, i need to learn to type better.
fuck you.
God isn't evil, he's insane. V.A.L.I.S.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Actually, the Apple retail stores just recorded their first profitable quarter of business. Take a look at this recent Apple press release which links to a broadcast of the 4th quarter investor conference call that gives the details about the recent profitiability of the retail outlets (among many other things). It didn't take long for the retail stores to start generating profits, and I would imagine the Music Store will become profitable in the next year or so. But I could just be full of shit.
Transistors and Beer!!
I prefer world and techno, and it's relatively easy to avoid the RIAA with such tastes.
BTW, if you think all those 400 "indies" are RIAA unaffiliated, you need to do a little more research...
So unless you REALLY know the bottom line on the what the number is, stop making things up and stating them with an air of authority. But of course, if you did that, then this wouldn't be /.
Actually I did get that number from a credible analyst. And I have read the same thing from more than one source, making it common. But this being slashdot I didn't feel like digging up the links and providing an academic posting that you seem to demand. Normally if I have the time (which I didn't earlier today) I would've. Funny, I new that somebody would trollcomplain about it.
So what I did do was provide a conservative estimate which is a time honored tradition when scratch-padding numbers like I was doing.
But as can be seen by this profit might be even be better than what I stated. But a possible worst case scenario is their $.35 "take", and suppose (worst case) $.25 operating costs (bandwitdth, employees, marketing, additional software licensing, office space, phones etc.) that would leave $.10, which makes my original analysis a credible ball park figure.
I assume that Fortune magazine has enough of an "air of authority" for you? I certainly did not make up what they said
No matter the case, that warm space under the rock over there awaits you.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This sentiment is completely rediculous.
Sorry, I always agree with the guy who spells "ridiculous" correctly.
> Apple gets 1$ per song
Actually, the record labels take a lot of that money.
Well, you also need to subtract operations costs. They have to pay for server maintenance, bandwidth, credit card charges, taxes (they eat the cost of these). The actual profit is probably fairly small. I'd venture to say closer to $0.05/song, if that.
They've made no secret that iTMS for Windows is a little like a Trojan horse, to boost branding and sales of iPods and possibly Macs. I think they make a small profit though that, in Volume can be significant. Also, they're likely to increase the profit margin with volume, as they should be able to centralize and reduce overhead.
-Alex
Artists hardly make any money off albums because the labels get it all! They are taking a chunk of the concerts and other publicity events as well. Believe me, the labels make more off the albums alone in the first year than the artist will make in their lifetime.
I think people need to give Apple a lot more credit than has been expressed. Think about it, how can a company which has such an insignifcant market share release something as small as mp3 player software with the iTMS and cause such a stir and debate. Hats off to Apple and Jobs, like them or not, they are driving the industry. Many clones i'm sure are on the way.
First off, I thing that iTunes is a really good piece of software and I'll be a great help in organizing my music collection and syncing with my iPod. But it seems that Apple designers became so focused on implementing all the cool features (music store, ripping, burning, etc) that they overlooked making it into a quality music player. After all, how hard can it be; just slap on the play/pause/rew/ff controls and you are set. Right? Wrong.
As it stands, the iTunes' interface is simply too clunky for a music player. That's bad. Music player's UI should have a different look and feel than that of a "normal" application. Winamp is very compact but functional. It can give you full playback controls, show the playlist, without taking too much screen real estate. I can put it where I need it, so that it's always at my fingertips, yet takes up minimum amount of space: it can run out of system tray; it can remain docked on top of other windows at the corner of the screen, just big enough to show controls and maybe a couple of playlist entries, etc.
With iTunes, it's all or nothing. The full application has to be in the foreground if you want to browse through the playlist, or just have the playlist in plain sight. This is very inconvenient. If you minimize the program to its compact size, you just get minimal controls; you can't see the playlist, and the program still wastes space on the taskbar as opposed to minimizing to system tray.
Another feature of Winamp that I am not willing to give up are global keyboard/mouse shortcuts (I had to get a plug-in for that.)
It shouldn't be hard to make iTunes do all that Winamp does right now in terms of UI. For starters, how about an option to display the playlist in the compact size? Not the entire title/genre/composer/blah/blah/ grid, just the title and the artist. Make the program minimizeable to tray. Implement global keyboard shortcuts. Give a few options for resizing/docking the compact view window. Then the program will truly be insanely great.
It costs me less than $0.30 per disc to produce cd's in my home and buying the cd's in quantities of 100.
;)
Now call me crazy but somehow I think it costs the labels who buy their discs in millions a wee bit less to do it, add power bills and salaries for employee's etc (although this could and should be a damn near fully automated process, 3 employees and a shipping crew could do everything to produce the discs for thousands of artists in a week), and let's say that cuts the margin to more like $0.20/disc for them. Now they sell them for $15-20 a cd. Somehow I don't think cd production is their biggest problem, and it's not like they have to look for retailers/distributors either.
Sad though, add the artist's $0.15 to that and it costs the studio $0.15 since the artist is charged for the production costs... most likely charged $0.35/cd, so make it $0 for the studio to produce cd's. Hmmm... I really don't see how the studios care about this one way or the other
No, actually, it took Steve Jobs and his amazing technicolor RDF. As much as I'd like to place principle over personality, it can't be denied that Jobs made this happen on the deal end of things.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Right, that's why I said they were barely breaking even. They have been losing a little money previously but now they have managed to make a small profit in the last quarter. I'm sure they will do better in the future but it really doesn't matter. As long as they aren't losing boatloads of cash they are well worth it for the advertising value.
Sapere aude!
Well, I imagine you meant to say "lossy", so I won't jump on that...
But, if you've got a CD/archival-quality AAC file (I've never used iTMS, so I don't know... are they good?), and you encode to CD-quality archival LAME VBR MP3, the little bit of quality loss you recieve would be negligable, I'm sure.
Now, what I want to see is a virtual CD-R device that, when you "burn" CDDA to it, just spits out an MP3 of whatever you made... anyone have any ideas/suggestions/naysaying?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
The difference is easy there, evil corp produced the gadgets. The labels don't produce anything. They are merely loan sharks and if they admitted as much the interest rates they charge would be FAR FAR beyond what is legal.
The artists have to pay back ALL the expenses and apple foots the bill for the distribution. The artist Produces the music, and pays all the related costs, hands it to the label, which in turn hands it directly to apple who distributes and sells it.
Obviously the label who does nothing but deliver the package from the artist to apple deserves the 80% cut in this transaction.
Your analogy is a broken because the label plays the part of UPS in this transaction, handling the delivery between the artist and apple. And in this case UPS is getting 80%!
Except that the artist is required to pay all those expenses out of their royalties. In the end, the label ends up with ZERO expenses. All the label does is act as a loan shark, but they can't admit that here in the states because their interest rates are far beyond what is illegal.
I'm pretty sure there a few other non-starters in the pack, but Sculley and Amelio made most of the supremo bad decisions with regard to marketing and sales.
I forgot another important player, Jean-Louis Gassee, who seemed to be doing his very best to alienate the developer community. A supremely self-absorbed person by all accounts, who left Apple to start his own company making computers based on a proprietary microkernel designed with POSIX compliance in mind. Ultimately admitting defeat by making it available on x86.
I feel there are some parallels between Jobs and Gassee, but I can't quite put my finger on what they might be.
"Re:Lot's of sales... No profit...
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20, @07:32PM (#7265230)
80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
Well, that plus also, you know, record the fucking music and whatnot.
As said by another poster in this story: it takes more to make music than a guy with a guitar. Without a record label, Jack Johnson or whoever would be selling CD's out of the back of his mom's Taurus.
The record companies are just as corrupt as ever.
Yes. They're corrupt because they front the cash and take the risk and therefore demand the lion's share of the rewards. The record labels are, in short, entrepreneurs."
The label takes highly calculated investment risks and basically gives loans. They expect the artist to pay this back OUT OF THEIR OWN ROYALTIES, and the label's own royalties are nothing but pure profit on top of it. Their profit isn't 80% minus expenses, it's 80% plus markup on the services they paid themselves for at a handsome profit to perform for the artists.
The record companies have a lockin on radio insuring the only way to get played is to go through them, THAT is why no bank would risk that kind of money on an unsigned artist.
Apple books pretty close to $1M per hour in revenue, so it's only about a 1% boost, and on top of that, the margins are probably lower than their overall product line.
Not that it isn't welcome, but Apple is hardly doing high-fives over the iTMS success except as part of the overall strategy. I wouldn't be surprised to see the iPod revenue pick up to match the iTMS pace, and the iPod has surprisingly high margins.
... just for browsing.
don't know about services, DLLs and such. maybe you are on windows?
There is no such thing as fair DRM. And the fact that you can bypass it so easily proves the fact that it is worthless.
You people sicken me. This post is absolutely correct and yet you label him as a Troll and completely ignore what he has to say. "Just another dissident, he disagrees just for the sake of disagreeing." I cannot believe the ignorance of the majority here. I cannot believe how the majority rolls over and takes the abuse. But the part that disgusts me the most is how whenever anyone tries to say how the majority is wrong, they are instantly ignored without even being considered. That level of arrogance is unacceptable. This poster is absolutely correct; DRM only hinders paying customers. Anyone determined enough to pirate is going to burn those files to a CD to bypass it as I've read in countless posts over the months that iTMS has been criticized. Do you not see the stupidity of your own statements? Are you so programmed and blind to think that you know what the DRM is for? Honestly I have no idea what the true motivation behind the DRM is, unlike many people on slashdot I am not naive enough to make such assumptions.
You people won't listen to me, however, you've already proved that by modding the parent troll. I will probably share a similar fate unless you people open your eyes and just think for a minute. You should not be lying down and accepting, you should be outraged and resisting this movement of oppression instead of just saying, "well they won't ever give us what we want to I'll take whatever they will agree to give me." A line that I've been hearing all too often in the form of, "Expecting legal downloads to ever be completely absent of DRM is completely ridiculous." When did you become so submissive? Are you giving up? You make me sick, why don't you take a loaded glock and dispose of yourselves, since people with your attitude are just worthless bags of wasted flesh and gray matter.
This is a WAKE UP CALL!
THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IS BEING LOST!
And no one cares.
anybody gotten it to work under Wine yet?
"'Tis a small mind indeed cannot think but of one way to spell a word." -Mark Twain
Yeah. I assumed 30 cents for Apple in my calculations. In reality it seems to be 19 cents for both Apple and the artist, but that doesn't significantly affect the outcome. My point was that hosting is cheap, when you only host MP3s (AAC) and mostly for paid customers (i.e. even if 90% of the traffic is in previews and 10% in purchased music, Apple still gets about 0.5 cents per Mb, which is more than enough to pay for hosting).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I prefer bridges, thanks. :)
/.
Apologies for having come across a bit harsh, but after having made my way through most of the thread and having read numerous postings sounding just as authoritative as your own spouting off just as many numbers, it started getting to me. Obviously, not all of you can be right, and it all has the appearance of speculation. You're just the one I lashed out at.
In reading your follow-up, its also apparent that your estimate wasn't what Apple's cut of the $.99 is, but more an estimate of their profit per song. Again, apologies.
History undergrad and now a law student - if you can't (or don't) cite a source for your information, your credibility is shot and anything you say is suspect. Of course, that same standard probably shouldn't be applied to
And lastly, while it's good to see a source (or some indication of personal authority on the subject), in general I don't give a rat's ass for what Fortune has to say. Then again, some people accuse me of being a socialist, so I guess that says it all...
Regards,
-j
fuck you.
"Apple offers 1 million clues to RIAA; none taken so far."
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Nope, the installer chokes on needing another exe file. Something to do with windows inatller I think. Thats under regular wine on Mandrake.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Cause all those companies that made Walkmans (of the non-TM generic sort) are really hurting right now... Sales slowed down gradually, and sales of new, improved products took over.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Apologies accepted. Bridges are indeed more preferable, but I tend to burn them down once in a while. So I hope you accept my apologies for suggesting the rock. Besides, you are going to get punished the day you pass the bar by being the butt of countless lawyer jokes. :)
Slashdot is a place where everything is played fast and loose, and I partake of that lifestyle all too often. But maybe that's why I like slashdot. I have been fooled by "authorative" sounding posts myself. But there is so much troll activity on here I should be more prepared.
Slashdot certainly has it's shortcomings. I usually spend alot of time making a post, so much so that I end up berating myself for doing so. And what do I get in return for being academic? Not much besides providing "content" for someone else. Because my posts take extra time, by time I click "submit" all the mods have gone home. This post I knew I was cutting a corner though, so I was doubly sensitive to your response.
Making the deals with the record companies to provide a wide range of music at reasonable cost, Apple must have felt like they were doing a deal with the devil, and we don't know how much blood was extracted from Apple.
The one good thing is that hopefully this sends a message to the record companies, that they have to provide flexibility, selection and price to their online offerings or face being ripped off by kazaa forever (as much as they think they can sue the world). I really believe that most people want to be honest about their music that they listen to. But they are not going to pay $20 for a downloaded album.
Perhaps this is what needs to be garnered as compared to how much Apple is/is not making, though it seems that this topic is a very long thread by now.
I spent the day thinking how I could rip mp3's off the radio (as taping off the radio is legal, though I'm sure the record companies want to undo this). That way I could get the music for free and honest and not pay the record companies a dime. I think there is a way it can be done (in a limited sense).
Anyway, I digress. sorry about the rock thing. I can see you are learning your lawyer lessons well.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
No apologies necessary - I set myself up for it. Just don't accuse me too much of "learning my lawyer lessons well." I'm trying hard not to let law school jade me. :)
/. etiquette and have a civil conversation...
Alas, we should probably end this before we violate
'til we meet again, grasshopper.
fuck you.
You can get used CDs on Amazon or eBay for $2.50.
There is also the wild allure of P2P sites which made Napster and Kazaa attractive. A search word turns up live tracks or tracks that have been remastered, or very rare tracks that you have no idea where they came from, like bootlegs or garage tapes. And, oh yeah, the Porno.
iTunes fills a commerical niche certainly but it is tame and predictable. It also runs on Windows 2000 or XP. I know quite a few people who haven't upgraded yet and have no intention to do so who run "low requirement" P2P software on Windows 98 with 32 MB of RAM.
There's also the bloatware problem. I don't know about other people, but Quicktime consistently crashes on me everytime I use it, whether its on Win95, 98, NT, or XP. I also have two or three versions of it on my machine because Apple can seem to engineer backward compatibility into one version.
So, based on my experiences with Qtime, my impression of Apple software is that it tends to be messy and leaves stray files littered all over the computer that are hard to clean up, like the defectory habits of a mad gerbil.
I don't need more left over pellets from Apple. And I don't need a $300 PDA with a mechanical hard drive that plays MP3s and sometimes doesn't know when it's fully charged or not; aka: iPod.
I think I'll stick with P2P.
Napster has extensive content agreements with the five major record labels, as well as hundreds of independents.
From the Napster About Us page.
If you are Apple trying to diversify let alone continue to exist in a Microsoft world, you have just gained a foothold on Mount Windoze. Maybe on the way up, you can make a little jing.
What's less cool is that you've been turned into a sherpa for the music industry. We'll see if it's a profitable model for Apple.
You actually belive UPS does anything but kick back and count the money rolling in? I have news for you, pal. Almost all the work is done by workers who are paid a fraction of the value of their work.
=P
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Does beating off to my MacZones catalog count?
agreed. I restrained myself from using the "grasshopper" line. Who says ESP isn't real?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
They're averaging 300,000 songs a day. On 1 February 2004 it will be hysterical - 100 million songs in two months is over five times that much.
I will switch to using this service.....when they support it in XMMS or NoAtun. How dare they ignore us Linux users!!!!
Thing is, anyone can also licence AAC since it's part of the MPEG 4 standard.
If any one outside The US is interested in having me buy an iTMS gift certificate for them, visit my site: arbitrary.org
They also claim to have had 1 million downloads of the windows version. So, at best, each new Windows user has bought 1 song and the existing Apple users didnt buy any songs at all in that period. At worst most people who downloaded it didnt bother buying *any music at all*. Probably since they couldnt get it to work. or found that it crashed their PC
Reading between the lines it looks like the launch of iTunes for Windows has actually been a bit of a flop.
Yet another worthless, obvious patent. Sigh. ..you'll be patenting worthless, obvious stuff so others won't patent it and demand royalties from you. Or, if someone tries anyway, you probably have a stupid patent they infringe on. So no, I wouldn't blame Apple from patenting the blatantly obvious, the fault is with the patent office for approving such idiocy.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING
evil as the (big) record companies are, they do something: promotion.
if you are an artist, and you have the choice between making 100% profit on the 500 CDs you sell to friends and at live concerts on the one hand, and making 10% profit on 1M+ CDs sold because of heavy promotion - which would you choose?
I have not seen anything here about the immense commercial power of the ITMS. I think that needs mention. It goes a long way explaining the 1M downloads.
Having downloaded ITMS / win, i, for some reason checked out the ITMS for the first time. Take a look at the front page, browse around a little...
Next think i know, i was busy downloading Herbie Hancock's Playlist for the low price of $10.99 - 70 full minutes of music, with Herbie's explanations of why the songs were meaningful to him. With album covers. Burnt on a CD and gave to my girlfriend.
Today, in response to some slashdot comments, i checked around there again... searching for a place where artists could sign up to publish their songs. However, once there, i got distracted quickly and just narrowly avoided buying more songs...
This thing is super-addictive! Just 99c per song, your login info plus credit card already conveniently stored - this is the first time on the internet that a commercial good is literally just one click away.
Click on a song, and you got it! Instant gratification. No waiting for FedEx packets... No entering credit card numbers... No delay. And just 99c. Why not check something out for under a dollar? Never, anywhere, has it been that easy to spend a dollar. And that is very, very clever.
I will not pay for MP3s, or any other lossy codec music.
If I could pay for a wav, CDQuality music (that I could burn/manage/keep just like physical property -- for as long as I pleased) then I might buy music online.
Dont be fooled friends, keep up the embargo against the RIAA -- finish them off.
you must be joking or flamebaiting
on my ibook:
i copied an entire DVD image (4.6gb) of my wedding from the external firewire drive to the internal drive, move one folder of imported video clips (about 1gb) to another external drive, while burning a dvd (another external drive) and i was surfing the web and listening to my itunes at the same time while some downloads were happening in the background
all this on my "lowly" g3 900mhz
stop spreading your FUD microserf, that's the only reason you would be posting as AC
-joe
The label's expenses to record, mix, produce cd's etc don't come out of their cut, they come out of the artist's cut.
On top of that, the label's often own the studio etc, and charge a premium for recording time. If the artist bombs it doesn't cost the label nearly so much because it's their own studio and the artist will be in debt for life. If the artist succeeds the studio gets their extremely high cut, plus profits on the "expenses".
I downloaded it and gave a copy to a friend and he doesn't have the net...i can't of been the only one. He also has a second hand ipod. Also he is buying a PB soon as a secondary machine. In some ways its working for Apple.
Jonathanjk.com
What could I do?
Use all those CD-Rs to build a bridge to the moon to escape the collection agencies.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Ahem, I stole this from Calvin and Hobbes. It's phonetic for Knowledge. You can find beginner courses everywhere for free on the net.
Supposing you don't know a lot about HTML and want to do this iTunes trick, the easiest way would be to "borrow" a HTML suit from someone (Adobe Golive, Macromedia Dreamweaver) and do some experimenting.
Try to learn some basics, since you'll have to access the code (which is easy).
Make a page that does it for you (and don't be afraid to rip of the design from another shop, since they've already thought a lot about information and incentives people need in order to talk to their wallets)...
Then do the copy-paste thing from Apple's website.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Perhaps your thinking of Mike 'Diesel' Spindler, famous for hiding under his desk.
hmm...
:: Gassee
:: Be :: BeOS :: BeOS x86 :: Zeta :: C++ :: Yellow :: POSIX :: Blinkenlights
Jobs
Next
NextStep
OpenStep
GnuStep
Objective C
Blue
Unix
Brushed Metal
Let me ask you this: How many times would somebody have to rob your house before you decided to lock the doors and install a security system?
It is kind of the same situation from the record companies point of view. While you own a CD when you buy it, and are free to personally copy it and distribute it around your home, you do not have the right to upload it to the rest of the Internet.
This is not a case of the few destroying it for the rest. Far, far too many people have violated the record companies rights. The record companies, in turn, are doing something about it.
Now, when you stand up in favor of shutting down P2P networks and other file swapping programs, then you may have an argument for DRM-less digital downloads. But, as long as a threat exists, preventative measures will be in place. This will be the case exactly as long as you allow the threat to continue.
Not that I agree with DRM, but I do see the need and reason. So, as a consumer who does not want to see P2P shut down (because it has valid uses) I'd rather see an acceptable DRM scheme that grants me exactly the rights I am afforded as the purchaser of my music. Apple's DRM does this really, really well.
As a side note, I wonder if you own any DVDs. If you do, I'd like to inform you that they employ one of the most restrictive, blantant anti-consumer copy protection schemes around.
I enjoy both movies and music. I realize that the companies funding these art forms need to make money in order to continue producing things that I enjoy. I also realize that they want to protect their products from unintended use. I am in favor of that, but will always champion those measures which do not infringe on legal, personal use.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
One of Apple's spokesmen acknowledged that iTMS didn't make any profit but called it a "trojan horse" to promote iPods and also Quicktime, MPEG4 and AAC. iTMS isn't intended to be a cash cow (at least not at present) but a component in a larger strategy. First and most obviously it drives iPod sales. Secondly, and in the long run more importantly, it will hamper Microsoft from using it's monopoly to dominate media formats the way they currently dominate office document formats.
I think everybody should have free speech, the right to vote (secret ballot), the right to own property, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness. So to answer you question it would be freedom for the people of the world from any government the would deny them these rights.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
I'm all for it.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Its called vertical integration.
Well, the other reply says it too, but I thought I should reiterate that "artists hardly make any money off of albums" because of the recording industry.
I think you just proved my point. Artists need the recording industry to promote them so they can make a little money off of concerts and the publicity, while the recording industry makes a ton money off the albums.
An artist who made more money off of fewer albums doesn't need the industry promotion, and thus doesn't really need the industry at all.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
...albeit for iTunes 3: Article 75451 :-)
Looks like lots of Rio, Nomad, and psa]play devices. Oh, and apparently the iPod too
Thanks,
Peter
Um, I downloaded & installed iTunes for Windows and immediately began browsing the store without giving *any* personal information. I only gave personal information later that evening when I decided to buy something.
... is that I have to jump through a bunch of stupid hoops just to listen to the music I paid for.
My car stereo plays MP3s. My DVD player plays MP3s. My portable Rio Volt plays MP3s. I didn't spend $500 on all that stuff just to listen to music 74 minutes at a time!
If DRM means that in order to listen to music the way I want to, I have to pay a buck, download the track (5 minutes), burn my tracks to a CD (10 minutes), rip it back to MP3 (10 minutes), then burn the MP3s to another CD (10 minutes), then what exactly is the incentive for me to use iTunes?
And if iTunes has a way to easily bypass the DRM, by converting the tracks straight to MP3s, then what the hell is the DRM good for? To keep people from sniffing my internet traffic and saving the song as I download it?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Always one URL away. Stuff arrives within a week. Real CDs, no compression, with authentic artwork and everything.
Sometimes buy.com has better deals on stuff, too.
Woot!! Spectacular! When I get my G5 I'll move up to the 100's. :-D
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
The ONLY thing the record company does is put the CD's into the bin space that they've already reserved at the record stores. With iTunes there's no physical product so they don't even do that.
So go educate yourself a little bit before you start posting obvious crap. Better yet, form a band and find out for yourself how quickly you can get screwed.
The virtual CD-R idea is clever. Unfortunately, it would lose all metadata associated with the original file.