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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'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."
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I find that record stores still beat iTunes in choice by far (never tried Napster 2). I can find very little of what I want on iTunes, less so than even KaZaA perhaps (the poorest selection of the major P2P clients), eMule still has the best albums I find.
You stole the article's punch by putting in your submission. Why should I even bother reading it now?
Right, but when you buy a CD you have the ability to rip to AAC, WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc. That's a lot of flexibility for $15. AAC at 128 is good, but you can hear the difference at AAC 192, and I'd rather err on the side of my ears. Plus I can use the tracks I rip in as many of my monthly mix cds as I like. This is assuming that you aren't buying some "copyright protected" pop CD. But of course, if you make that assumption you kind of also assume that more than 2 tracks will be good.
Numbers to prove this last statement (generated by checking the track count of an automatic playlist made by adding anything with a 3 star rating that was purchased in 2003 or 2002):
Of the cds I've bought in the past year, 87% of the tracks have been well worth it. Then again, only a few of these albums were really popular...the big three were the last Queens of the Stone Age record (at 100% because i am such a Mark Lanegan fan), Audioslave (which offsets the average with only 6 tracks marked as three star or better) and the new Radiohead (100%).
So anyway, assuming 13 tracks, a CD costs about $1.50 per good track. That is 50% more than the files at 128 kbit AAC...so you make the call, flexibility or value?
Oh, and if you're one of these cats who goes online to find JUST the radio song and never even really listens to the rest of the album...maybe you should step back and ask yourself what you're really looking for out of music. There's more to sound than just pop hooks and clever choruses, you know, and if there weren't we would still be playing Bluegrass.
Hey freaks: now you're ju