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McDonald's Billion-Song iTunes Giveaway

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.

camperslo writes "The New York Post online has this story. "Less than a month after Pepsi announced a blockbuster deal to give away 100 million downloads from Apple's iTunes music service to its customers, McDonald's is close to a announcing a much bigger deal"." No matter what you think of iTunes, this is tremendous publicity for music on demand services in general. If the public gets a taste for it, this could be the beginning of the end for the audio CD.

4 of 600 comments (clear)

  1. So far, Apple and McDonalds haven't confirmed by burgburgburg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not saying this isn't going through. I'd be very happy if it did. I'm just saying that having the NY Post as the sole source of your business news piece isn't confidence inspiring.

  2. Re:AAC is nice and all... by webslacker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's kind of hard to complain about this when it's a free for the customer.

    It's a lot easier distributing 1 billion songs online than 70 million cd's.

  3. McDonald's denies the rumor by Therlin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    According to this article, McDonald's is denying the rumor by saying "There are no agreements to announce, so anything else is pure speculation."

  4. Re:In other News... by Graff · · Score: 3, Interesting
    And I still like cd quality audio

    CD quality - isn't that some sort of oxymoron? :-)

    Remember that to make a CD they sample the masters at 16 bit and 44 kHz. This is quite a big loss in quality. For iTMS they also encode the music - not from the CD as you would at home, but directly from the masters. They encode it as a 128 kbps, 44kHz AAC file, which ends up sounding pretty close to CD quality. This is because AAC does a great job of keeping the encoded sound close to the original sound, especially when compared to MP3s at 128 kbps.

    I've bought a good deal of tracks from the iTMS and they all sound just about the same as the CD versions. They certainly sound way better than stuff that I've ripped from CD to MP3 at 160 kbps.
    --
    Sapere aude!