iTunes Music Store - 'Coolest Invention of 2003'

Pingsmoth writes "Time Magazine has just named the iTunes Music Store as their Top Coolest Invention of 2003. Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man'."

Comments

Bah

[Sloppy]

The only "innovative" thing about iTunes music store that mp3.com didn't already have, is that they're willing to sell in smaller units (songs instead of albums). I guess that's an improvement for mass-advertised style music (where people hear a song on the radio and are programmed to like that one song) but for many genres, it isn't a serious improvement at all, since the user will want the whole album, in which case the iTunes approach can even end up being more expensive.

So yeah, that one part of it, happens to be innovative you like massively-pushed music.

And of course, iTunes music store sells their stuff in a weird format for which there are very few players. (Some people (well, usually AC trolls) keep saying that the AAC format isn't "weird" and is standardized, but they forget that the DRM effectively makes the files nonstandard.) The fact that MS Windows users needed special software before they could take advantage of the service, and the fact that every other platform in the universe except for Windows and MacOS still can't use the service, shows just how flawed the approach is, from a "standards" perspective. mp3.com (and other services like them) beats the living shit out of Apple's product in this regard, has had that advantage for many years, and there is little hope that Apple will ever modernize and become competitive, thanks to their DRM requirement.

The DRM is really dumb, too. In order to make the DRM at all tolerable to users, they had to effectively neuter it by letting people burn the music to CD. So it doesn't actually provide any copy protection at all; it merely adds a monopoly chokepoint to the users' toolchain. Worst of all worlds: inconvenience the good guys, don't slow down the bad guys. (In other words, the typical results whenever copy protection is involved.)