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

Re:Hardly an Invention

[EinarH]

Now if they radically opened up the distribution to bypass the majors... now that would be rather revolutionary...

It's called Magnatunes.

-No DRM. MP3
-Try before you buy
-Artists get 50% of the purchase price, artists keep the rights to their music.
-No RIAA connections.

One word about iTunes

[mrsev]

DRM

Re:One word about iTunes

[fafaforza]

Without DRM there would be no iTunes store.

Re:Hardly an Invention

[code_echelon]

I completely agree with you.

"I've seen nothing compelling about their 'invention'...I've no reason to go and purchase an iPod or iMusic. "

I don't think this is a revoulutionary idea at all, distributing music online is not a new concept and they are not the first ones to do it 100% correctly they are the first that have done it somewhat correctly. The three points this user gives are a perfect examples of why it is not a perfect system and with the advent of more music companies on the Internet they are going to lose even more buisness to other competitors as this is not something that is going to be hard for others to reproduce.

Furthermore at $1 a song I may as well go buy the CD since I also live in Canada and most CD prices have gone down to $10 to $14 a CD. This makes $1 a song hardly an amazing deal.
They also don't even make money off it, they use it to push there iPod sales. If Microsoft was doing this, there would be 800 replies to this by now and everyone would be screaming how they have a monopoly and are an evil company. I'm not a fan of M$ but am a fan of Apple even less, and if something else popped up I know plenty of people that would switch just to stop using anything affiliated with Apple. The downloads this week of Kazaa also annihilated the sales off iTunes.

Re:Fuck Yeah

[pHDNgell]

Well, it's no fair that you have voice recognition or something on your computer so you can start the application without clicking.

It might be different in the Windows version, but on the Mac, I can place an audio CD in my slot loading drive, and it will automatically rip with my settings and spit the CD back out. It makes the process about as easy as it can be without creating a robot to change the CDs.