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Comparing Online Music Offerings
hype7 writes "The Wall Street Journal has just posted a comparison of the three main legal music download services: Apple's iTunes Music Store, MusicMatch and Napster v2. The review covers the pros and cons of each of the services, and concludes with: "I'm sure all three services will evolve and get better, and others will enter the fray. But, for now, iTunes is the best choice on Windows.""
I've purchased 134 songs so far from itunes. Every time I have purchased songs from them the download has been fast(i am on a DSL) and the quality is amazing..Selection is great but i wish they more stuff from the 80's.
Now with books and personal playlists and gift certs, they have made it even better...
the best part is that the artists get their share...whether you agree its a fair share is a different matter since apple did not write the contracts between the record companies and the artists...
I will tell you this though... whatever they are getting from itunes is way more then they are getting from Kazaa downloads...
has there been any converter program written? like aac2mp3 or wmf2mp3 that will move through the encryption?
also i would be curious to know what security each of these 'stores' have in place, seeing how you are using their app to go over the network.. would be interesting to see if any concerns arose from shortcuts to meet promo deadlines..
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No it's not. You only say that because it's cheaper than the massively inflated price of most retail CDs. And even that's changing - Universal's new pricing virtually destroys any cost benefit to downloading, outside of the price of gas to drive to Best Buy.
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Your example does not convert over to audio compression. First of all, you are repeating the compression with the same technology. Second of all, that technology does not even remotely compare to audio/image compression.
The loss in any kind of lossy compression occurs in the step function (I forget the exact term, step quantization I believe.) If you encode with one function, decode, and encode with a differenct step function, you will have two levels of loss. The compression is very complicated and has multiple steps. I know image compression uses transforms as well and I would assume audio compression woudl do something similar but I am not certain here.
You gave a compression example, consider mine:
compression scheme a: step quantifier of 7
compression scheme b: step quantifier of 15
encode 137 with method a: 137/7 = 19
decode 19 with method a: 19*7 = 133
encode 133 with method b: 133/15 = 8
decode 8 with method b = 8*15 = 120
120 != 137
That is an oversimplification on how the quality is lossed in jpeg compression. The larger the quantifier, the greater the compression/quality loss. The same idea goes for audio.
(Please forgive me if I used some incorrect terminology; it's been a while.)
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The fact is, once you buy music over iTunes, it *IS*, indeed YOURS. You are dismissing far too quickly the fact that you can burn it onto a CD and play it onto an unrestricted amount of devices. Many other "unlimited" services out there have DRM built-in stuff you download from them, but you can only play your music as long as you pay the monthly fee to listen to it. Apple lets you actually OWN it. And yes you can play your music on as many computers as you want, just not an infinite number of computers simultaneously. It does make perfect sense. Nobody controlls your iTMS-purchased music. It merely attempts to duplicate in a digital format hoops you would normally have to jump thru in the past to copy music you owned onto another medium, without the loss of quality. The only people this DRM model hurts are people who want to freely distribute their commercial (not freeware, not shareware) music to people who didn't pay for it.
Unrestricted digital music formats simply cannot live as "for sale music". Such formats will always either apply to free, shareware (a-la Magnatune), or pirated music. THAT is the issue. Now, don't blame Apple for being the first company to bring the world (well, the U.S. in practicallity) the first and only online store to offer a business model that mostly sastisfies all parties involved, in a very friendly, convenient interface. If music is to legally be sold in a digital format, that digital format NEEDS to have some sort of digital rights management. I challenge you to prove otherwise. If you want to blame somebody, then blame your favorite artists for going to big record labels in the first place, versus recording music on their own and making their music available for free on the internet as mp3's. Blaming Apple is non-sensical. Apple has managed to curb the record labels' hegemony and make it play nice with the consumers. Not only that, but Apple's online store ALSO allows independent, smaller record labels (such as CDBABY) to play with the big guys, and Apple has even dedicated an entire portion of their online music store to surface indie music and raise awareness to it.
Now if you stop and think about it, this is HUGE for indie music: It works this way: Big record labels promote their own music big time via the big AOL and PEPSI hooplah, and tell everyone to go buy music from the online music store. You suddenly get hoardes of average joe-blow consumers looking at the iTMS and wondering ... OoOOoo, what's that "indie music" thingamadoodle? Gee lemma check it out.
I like the principle behind Magnatune, i think it is valiant and worthy effort which definitely shows what the Internet is all about. But face it, artists that want to make it big-time (and i do mean BIG) NEED record labels. why? because it's a whole package: Record labels get your music PROMOTED. Until your music is promoted, it ain't worth shit. It's sad, it's infuriating, but it's true. Because right now people spend more time in front of the TV, listening to the radio, going to the movies, walking and driving the streets while passing hundreds of billboards, all of this courtesy of ClearChannel, than surfing the web for cool, original, worthy artists that are different from what the mass media shoves at our face.
There is a market for indie music, but the largest market still remains popular music owned by record labels. Apple will allow the first one to grow, and enable consumers to get what they want from the second one.
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