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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'."
Making some digital media available online is not new.
I remember having the possibility to purchase media online long before this.
Now, if, of course, having these integrated in iTunes is cool, I somehow doubt it is that "cutting edge" (even though I am a Mac enthusiast and I love OSX).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Much as I think Apple have created an amazing proof of concept in the Apple Music Store I am not convinced it qualifies as an invention.. Downloading music off the internet is not new and paying for it is not new either... Now if they radically opened up the distribution to bypass the majors... now that would be rather revolutionary... but we'll have to see how far they take it..
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
iTunes integrates a music store with a music player. Ooh. Maybe I'm missing something because I'm only using it on Windows, but it doesn't exactly wow me the way I expected the 'Coolest Invention of 2003' to.
Frankly, I'm even disappointed with the Segway. They shouldn't be handing out this invention to anything that doesn't have wings at this point.
This counts as an "invention"?
Look, the absolutely coolest invention of 2003 is the USB wristwatch. My watch holds all the essential stuff I used to keep on a diskette. Nothing helps bonding like showing people that your watch can store porn. Or a PowerPoint presentation. Or your latest baby photos. Whatever they need: my watch has it.
But iTunes? I can't carry it on my wrist.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
In the words of Our Mighty Insectoid Overlord, Bugzilla:
WORKSFORME
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Much as I like iTunes... spot the AOL Time Warner and iTunes connection.
my favorite would have to be the snorkel fm radio. Of course, the wet babe in the bikini may be influencing my opinion.
* Especially if you've been facing imminent extinction for some 20-odd years.
Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
A pocket nuclear fusion reactor is an invention, a biplane made out of recycled cheese is an invention, a new kind of breaking system for cars is an invention.
iTunes is a store. It happens to be on the internet. That's not an invention, no matter how well executed it is.
Beep beep.
Must have slept in longer this morning then I thought. Good thing 2003 is over. Those last 2 months went buy really quickly. Nothing significant must have been invented...
The article mentions that the iTunes store doesn't have the rights to resell the Beatles' music. I wonder if that's due to the ongoing trademark turf war between Apple Computer and Apple Records (the Fab Four's label, and - according to legend - the appleinspiration for the name Jobs and Woz gave their kit computer). As I recall, one of the terms of a past settlement between the two was that the computer company would stay out of the music-publishing business.
iTunes for Windows is my official new favorite MP3 player.
I am proceeding to rip all my 500+ CDs into iTunes. With one click.
Winamp has served me well for many, years, but it lacks the snazzy playlist/library editor, and the ability to transfer music from CD, to the hard drive, tag it, and add it to my playlist at the click of a button. Literally.
Sure, it's a little slow, but who cares. Its functionality is unmatched. The music store is snazzy, too.
Good move, Apple, with iTunes for Windows. You may see a future Mac / iPod customer soon...
I remember seeing fish leather products in Darwin at a Kawasaki/Harley dealership about 7 years ago, though I don't recall if there were any bikinis.
However, I did find this reference to fish leather bikinis, dated 2001. Sorry, can't find pics :-(
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Sorry, but something that gives you a longer erection is hardly the successor to MDMA.
Peace and love, y'all
hmm, i just installed iTunes and wanted to take a look to the music store. I'm living in Austria and when i wanted to connect to the store a message informed me that this service is not available here. so, does is help when i change the value in the "country" state at the registration or does apple a lookup where the ip adress is registered? furthermore, since i pay by credit card where is the problem with buying music from iTunes Store. if the RIAA is making problems concerning the copyright in different country's, hell, they shoud be glad someone actually buys their music and not downloading it from kazaa.
".Sig Stealer" was here
Apple takes it's (big) cut and then the Artist's (frequently RIAA affiliated) label takes most of the rest.
On the contrary, a big cut of the $0.99 goes to the RIAA while the credit card companies swallow the rest. Steve Jobs says so.
While writing a little multithreaded print workflow app in AppleScript for the client, I struck upon an idea: what if I could expose the functions of iTunes using AppleScript in a client/server type arrangement, and then make those functions accessible across the network to a Debian system running a modified dselect iTunes browser? AppleScript is pretty powerful, as any seasoned Mac user will attest, so it was quick work to create a handy little mutithreaded fully re-entrant AppleScript based server for the core iTunes functions (load song, play song, browse playlist, buy song etc).
The next part was to patch dselect on the Linux side so it could connect to my AppleScript server/wrapper on the Mac. I'd previously extended dselect with a Scheme-scriptable plugin, so it only took me a day or two to modify dselect with some Scheme macros so that it emulated to look and feel of iTunes (using ASCII art of course!!), but accessing the actual iTMS functions though the network exposed AppleScript..errr..script.
It worked a treat!! It is now a simple matter of running dselect on my Debian box to browse the iTMS, as long as the Mac over in the corner running the AppleScript wrapper is turned on of course. I have actually implemented a direct USB->USB cross over connection to get around bottlenecking problems with our Ethernet so I don't have to put up with skipping in iTMS MP3 playback. Now it works great!!!
The final step will be to patch apt-get with iTMS interface functionality...then buying my favorite music legally will only be an apt-get install Justin-Timberlake away!
Which is nice.
I just bought a brand new iBook G4, which is like the coolest thing ever. But as far as sequenced groups of electrons go, iTMS kicks so much ass it isn't even funny. seriously. I totally dislike buying CDs because well, I hate malls, and the record stores here in Tralee don't have any of the Boston bands I like, such as Dropkick Murphys. P2P is unreliable. If I had a job I'd trash all my mp3s and just buy a whole new collection off of iTMS (a lot of my files got screwed up from transfering them from CD-Rs which i highly abused).
They are protecting themselves against credit card fraud.... see here to see what I'm talking about..
Stop supporting the murder of thousands of helpless fish! Don't you understand that millions of fish are being senselessly killed and raped of their skin just to support a fashion trend? How would you like it if somebody wore your skin?
I wish that you could feel the suffering that our friends in the ocean are feeling every time their skin is being harvested for pure capitalist profit. It tears my soul apart when I hear someone advocating such violent acts against creatures that have brains twice as complex than our own!
I'm going to go listen to some emo and cry about what you said. I hope you're happy, killing fish and sending people like me into deep, dark, depressive states.
Go to Hell,
Your Friendly PETA Activist
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Surely that is the coolest thing in the world, I've seen the adverts, its lets me do more with less, I can consolidate all my domains down to just 4. AND I can then slide.
Microsoft Server 2003 is the coolest invention of the year, and MacDonalds are a healthy food option.
Wha' da' ya mean dominated by advertising ? Me and Mary Beth were only on Jerry Springer twice.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
"Mac users, who represent only 3% of the computer world...in the 97% of the world that uses Windows PCs"
Sorry guys, it's now official. *BSD is dead. Time says so. In fact, so is Linux.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Ethics:
iTunes - Apple takes it's (big) cut and then the Artist's (frequently RIAA affiliated) label takes most of the rest.
Magnatune - The artist gets 50%!!!
Again, no contest. Instead of feeling guilty about fueling a powermad monster when you buy music you can feel good about supporting the people who actually made it!
Actually, according to Steve Jobs, Apple doesn't make any profit from the iTMS. Their cut of the proceeds barely covers their costs, apparently, while the RIAA takes the lion's share (leaving the artist with a pittance, of course).
(This info came from Jobs' recent financial results conference call (of which the iTMS data can be found in this CD Freaks new item (with a link to the original story from The Register.))
Other than that, I mostly agree with the points that you raised in your post.
D.
They do use a lossless codec, Flac.
You can't even compare several hundreds of thousands of songs to hundreds of songs... But the philosophy behind Magnatune sure is cool!
Salmon skin bikini? I'd rather go naked to the beach. On a second thought, I already do. And have salmon-skin sushi on the beach. Isn't that a better combination? :)
Cozinha para as massas (e para geeks)
I'd rather put Open Office 1.1 in there.
"which makes money off of ITunes"
which makes money FROM iTunes
That was classic intercourse!
I like there slogan: "We are not evil." Very reassuring. Seriously though, they have some quality artist, based on what I heard on their streams.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
The parent was not modded down for criticiziing iTunes. It was modded down because it was flamebait. Notice the use of the phrases "Apple zealots" and "gay little Apple logo" along with vague derogatory adjectives like "crappy" and "retarded." If the author of that post would like to post a revised edition of his comment that had been proofread and written in a logical, mature manner, I would be more than happy to pay attention to his opinions.
Not that I'm holding out hope or anything. This is Slashdot, after all.
quite possibly, but those of us outside the USA don't get squat with all the new services, or have to put up with a windows only facility.
hmm sees a business oportunity, if only the various RIAA type organisations around the world could be convinced about non-DRM implementations of this stuff. I mean it's a pain having to go via a couple of phono leads to put the material on a CD I play in my car (via cassette in my case so the quality drops).
i guess it qualifies as "coolest" since the definition of cool these days seems almost synonymous with music.
maybe i'm odd, but i don't see why so many people believe the hype that music is so essential to life. I swear some people say stupid things like "music is my life" as if it's a cool thing and kids define themselves by the music they like. people who have different tastes in music now seem to belong to different "crowds". "what bands do you like" and "are you in a band" seem to have become almost as standard cliches as "hello" and "how are you". This is insane.
"come see my band play", groupie girls stupidly having their lame thing over "band boys" and the slut-izisation of american teenagers under peer-pressure that makes giving head to someone who's in a band an admirable and eviable thing is pure degradation of minds through the incessant brainwashing brought upon them by MTV & co and other industry-driven glamourization of music.
get a grip people, music isn't essential, isn't that glamorous, and it's a sad sad state of affairs that it occupies such a big share of the national entertainment culture. It's even more than entertainment for some.
From the article:
"At most, Jobs is left with a dime per track, so even $500 million in annual sales would add up to a paltry $50 million profit. Why even bother?"
Excuse me? A paltry $50 MILLION dollar profit?!?
'Paltry' and '$50 million dollar profit' don't belong in the same sentence.
This mentality is what's screwing the entire downloadable music process. It's not about whether it's profitable, it's about whether it's profitable enough.
Just for them saying that, I'm going to download some MP3s tonight. WTF...
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Smart Playlists is what did it for me. Being able to categorize my music by how much I listen to it and my favorite artists instead of having to add each and every song by hand is a great time saver. Maybe the dudes over at nullsoft can borrow this idea...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I can see people having trouble with Time's use of the word "invention". It's their language, not Apple's. So many have used patents in an abusive way, it's easy to get into a defensive posture on even hearing the word invention. In the context of the Time article, "creative consumer offering" would better fit what they are talking about.
A product is more than a list of features. It's also about philosophy. Fairness, paying attention to the overall experience, and caring about behind the scenes detail is all part of this. Most consumers aren't likely to know that Apple is paying for the high-quality Fraunhofer IIS MP3 codec to let them use it for free in iTunes. Don't expeect to see things like that from MS/Napster. As any Linux user can tell you, beauty is more than skin deep.
...according to a poll on technical innovation website T3.co.uk. The story is in this Ananova article describing just how vital it is.
SlipHead.com is a cool new site following in this trend if any of you are interested. It's basically a free forum for the exchange of ideas with a methodology similar to open-source software. Take a minute to check it out!
It's November. How can they possibly know what the coolest inventions of 2003 are?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's so cool that anybody who doesn't live in the United States can't use it! THAT'S SO FREAKING COOL, ISN'T IT!? ARRGH!!
[Breathes]
Seriously though. One would have thought that, when releasing a product to a world-wide audience, the software would be usuable by said audience. As it stands, when things like this happen, it just demonstrates that the United States still thinks that it's the center of the Universe. Grrr.
Ah, those shameless Europeans. :-)
And now, with fish-leather thongs, I can see millions of women saying "no, honestly honey, the smell's from my bikini."
Start a happiness pandemic
Actually, record contracts are geographically specific. Contractually, a record label gets the rights to sell recordings on behalf an artist in one specific country or group of countries. For example, the rapper Dizzee Rascal is on XL Records in the UK, but will be on Matador in the US. Since labels are responsible for promoting and manufacturing records, they usually limit themselves to a certain region. It makes sense in terms of physical recordings being sold through shops. I have to agree that such a system doesn't make sense online. However, you run into the same issues with books and electronics as well.
This doesn't make the U.S. the hub for all music. In fact, there is a considerable amount of international music that never makes it to the States. There are even bands from Canada that don't make it to the U.S.
This guy built one himself.
I don't think it's as groundbreaking as the hype would lead you to believe. That, and I think it predates 2003 by a bit.
Anyone else notice how many functional robots there are in this section?
...
Robots have been "the future" for so long, I kinda wrote them off with flying cars and moonbases. But slowly, they are becoming real
Which is cool. Except for that robo-cat, which looks to me like a creepy undead reanimated cat-pelt.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Among the contenders, we had stuff straight out of sci-fi : a invisible camouflage suit, a wearable robot suit which augments your strength (just like in those cartoons), glasses with a built in screen and camera, and the winner for coolest invention was... iTUNES? WTF??
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
So iTMS is all cool and stuff, but better than a flu vacinne (sp?), or a water purifier? I mean, this stuff could save lives, while the iTMS is just for downloading music. Mabey it's that Time is par of TimeWarner and they own the music companies...
Compere: Well, you can't get much more interesting than that, or can you? With me now is Mr Thomas Walters of West Hartlepool who is totally invisible. Good evening, Mr Walters. (turns to empty chair)
... Even now you yourself, you do hardly notice me...
Walters: (off-screen) Over here, Hughie.
Compere turns to find a boringly dressed man sitting by him.
Compere: Mr Walters, are you sure you're invisible?
Walters: Oh yes, most certainly.
Compere: Well, Mr Walters, what's it like being invisible?
Walters: (slowly and boringly) Well, for a start, at the office where I work I can be sitting at my desk all day and the others totally ignore me. At home, even though we are in the same room, my wife does not speak to me for hours, people pass me by in the street without a glance in my direction, and I can walk into a room without...
Compere: Well, whilst we've got interesting people, we met Mr Oliver Cavendish who...
Walters: (droning on)
I believe we might be overlooking what the phrase "at most" means. Apple's probably outlaid millions in R&D, hosting, advertising, etc to make -- at most -- $50 million annually. At the least, Apple might not even be making the dimes mentioned above. The return on investment is perhaps not the best as far as Apple's stockholders are concerned, as another post mentions -- if taken at face value.
That's why iPod sales are so important. When increased iPod sales, or even sustained iPod sales to Windows users in the face of new competition, and only then, is "WinTunes" a good idea and produces a better ROI than buying US Treasury bonds.
Folks, Apple's a big corporation. A fifty million dollar gain annually is, whether we like it or not comparing it to the scale of dough in our bank accounts/wallets, not horribly big money.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Companies have been doing this for years. This isn't new or even an Invention.
From the way it sounds they are leading in the technology, and have found the best ways to distribute music, but that doesn't mean this style of business is original.
Good for Apple, but Time really needs to pull their head out of their asses if this was the best invention they could find.
TruePunk | Games
Mac OS systems may comprise about 3% of the yearly sold amount of personal computers. That's market share.
However, Mac OS systems do NOT comprise 3% of the total installed base of all computers. A more likely number of Mac OS systems in use is around 20-25%, if not a little larger.
An installed base of 3% could not possibly support the software sales for Mac developers, particularly games and business applications. It's just not possible. Try not repeating what you hear unless you understand it.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Look at that cat. It's meant to keep you "calm and happy". It turns its head, moves its ears and blinks its eyes. Calm and happy? More like nervous and scared. Think Chucky :-/
A meaningless question in the real world. You need to look at the downside, or the overall risk. For example, what's the odds of either investment resulting in a -100% result? Most likely the 20% potential return is riskier. There's also questions of liquidity.
There's also the concepts of building a brand image and getting in early to grow a market which is still pretty nascent. *That's* how a CEO serves his long term shareholders properly. The "gimme billion percent profit margin now!" daytrader "I've owned this stock for two hours and I haven't doubled my money yet!" types can go get bent. It's their influence that has led to so many BS products and ripoffs and overpriced junk, especially in the tech market.
--- Ban humanity.
"It's a disarmingly simple concept: sell songs in digital format for less than a buck and let buyers play them whenever and wherever they like--as long as it's on an Apple iPod."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Again, wrong.
You can tell the author of this article never actally used iTunes or the iTunes music store. The iPod is completely optional.
I don't have an iPod and I've been using iTunes for years. I will probably never get an iPod. Still, I'm a daily user of iTunes.
It was my fault for reading this silly article. I mean, this is Time magazine. What do they know about technology? Just enough to write some copy. The harm here is that it really short-sells iTunes AND the iTunes Music Store by harping on an optional component.
--Richard
Hey, I do this at least once a month and the watch survives, believe me! I even think my MP3s sound better when the USB port has been washed a little.
Actually, and seriously the watch is 'water resistant', and because the USB port is basically dead if it's not connected, I suspect that it can get wet and not care so long as it's dried before use.
It's just somewhat easier than carrying a USB flash drive around with you, and sitting on one's wrist it's probably safer than hanging off a keychain or rattling around in a pocket.
Bluetooth would be sweet too... but I suspect it would have bad battery issues, which the USB watch does not.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Purifying water (one of the lauded inventions) is a cool thing, very relevant to billions around the world, but doing it by distillation is just a joke.
There is a much simpler and just as effective way to purify water in tropical or desert countries: place it in a transparent plastic bottle in the sun for a day. The water heats to 80 degrees and after a few hours is totally sterilised. The mud and gunk settle to the bottom, and what's left is clean and drinkable.
I spent a few days on this once, trying to improve the process of separating the gunk from the water: the principle was to extract the gunk from the bottle which could then be closed and carried some distance. My design requires a straw and a bit of clay. But even that's not worth doing: to solve the problem of drinkable water in most of Africa, all one would need is to ship a billion or so used PET bottles.
Sigh. People like complex solutions to simple problems.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
THank you. You saved me the time and typing.
and to further clarify:
point 3: uhm, what exactly is point three? Terms of licensing are high? AS in cost to the customer? Or cost to the record label? Indie's and Majors all get the same treatment (link found elsewhere in this article)- its 99 cents a song, albums for 9.99, songs over 7 minutes are only available as albums. If an album has less than 10 tracks, its number of tracks times 99 cents (5 track ep costs 4.95)
As for driving iPod sales, this is actually a COUNTER to your claim- they don't care to make money off iTunes, they just want a kick ass service, so you'll use iTunes, and then maybe you'll think about buying an iPod.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I love how in the article they say iTMS is giving Apple a mere $0.10 per song. 10% profit doesn't sound too bad to me, especially in the highly-comoditized PC market. Granted, it's not what Apple is used to. They're used to 30% profit margins from their computer sales. But 10% of millions (and some day billions) is nothing to cough at. I wouldn't mind a nice steady stream of 10% of $500 million. But like Steve said...they're selling iPods which gives them a cool 35% or so for each one sold. Niiiiiice.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I bet if I looked into the corporate conglomerate that Times belongs to I'd find some interesting reasons as to why.
Clothing Sizes Chart for listed items:
American
8
10
12
14
16
18
huh? 8 - 18 girls eat.
If she floats, she's a witch.
So what this is saying is...
If I build a mouse (click click, not squeak squeak) that just happens to be the most responsive, comfortable mouse on the market... Does that mean I invented the mouse?
BMW makes very nice cars... Does that mean they invented "very nice cars"? No, of course not.
Maybe if I had something truely original and revolutionary in the new design, I could claim to have invented that part of it. But just because you came up w/ a better version of what's already out.
Nitpicking I know, but I get peeved when people say Edison invented the light bulb.
Besides, I never considered Time to be a good source of judging ANYTHING. There's better stuff out there.
hmmm, fish skin bikini....
"What is that smell?!?"
"No, i swear it's my bathing suit!!!"
Riiiight. Very few players. (80% marketshare for the lazy)
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.
In your world "nonstandard" apparently means "protected". If it's not freely shareable, it's not standard. For the rest of us, standard means just that - it's a recognized, non-proprietary standard... which AAC is, even the .m4p protected format.
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
Someone always has to be on the beginning end of a standard. With your attitude, no innovation would ever catch on. 10baseT? You need special hardware to move up from coax 10base2. That's not standard. USB? You need special hardware to use it instead of serial. That's not standard. And this whole 'wheel' thing - don't you need an axle first? How "unstandard".
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.
Heh. Apple - 17 million in sales. MP3.com? Less than a million. Fewer artists, worse selection, and no RIAA member artists - and before you get on your indie high-horse, there are some good artists that are [gasp] mainstream. Not everything out there is Britney. If you want us to be open-minded about indie artists, you have to likewise be open-minded about large-label artists. And it's the DRM requirement that's making Apple competetive, by allowing them to actually work with the RIAA members.
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.)
Hmmm... I can burn an album 10 times to CD without changing the playlist. Not at all inconvenient. The "bad guys" who are burning 10,000 copies to sell on the streets? They have to change the playlist 1000 times. Very inconvenient. I don't see what your problem is.
-T
You think Apple doesn't want to sell you stuff because of some center-of-the-universe conceit or other? They would gladly sell you anything you wanted, anything they could convince you you wanted, if their deals with the labels allowed it. They don't -- and this isn't different from any traditional music licensing in that way.
The next company you run into that could make a bazillion dollars in a foreign market, but chooses not to because they're a bunch of arrogant Americans, that'll be a first. You post a story about that one then.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The "car that parks itself" was the biggest disappointment of 2003 for me. I sometimes drive around for 40 minutes searching for a parking space near my house in Amsterdam. I would love to have a car that finds itself a space after I get home.
Turns out it only manages the 2 second parallel parking routine. Now that helps. And it "senses kerbs": I wouldn't try this on the canalside parking spaces we have a lot of here. This system isn't even a good idea for tourist rental cars.
Ok, I see what you're saying, and you're right -- for the most part, music licencing is region-specific. That is exactly what's cheesing me off. :P
:P
The Internet is a global community; I'm of the opinion that, if a software company is going to release a product to said community, then EVERY member of that community should be able to use it. (Or, if not, at least have a large message on the site indicating this.)
As it stands, I'd love to use iTunes, but Apple only bothered to think about the United States when it determined the licencing scheme. That is, in a word, crap.
Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man
;)
why would anyone need a fish-skin bikini or a new love drug when you're an invisble man? you can already see everything... all the naked flesh you want... and i'm sure you wouldnt need a love drug there... uh wait.. you're inivisble, your partner wont be able to feel *ahem* ANYTHING?
my blog
I'm in Canada, chief. Not from the UK. I'm a two-hour drive away from the oh-so-glorious United States, in fact.
using this to sell iPods isn't exactly the greatest idea, IMO
I'd trust Steve Job's business sense over yours any day unless you've managed to start a company as successful as Apple and then managed to save it from the administrative blunders of the next few CEOs.
The iPod is now Apple's highest margin product. If they sell $2000 of computer or $2000 of iPods, they make more money on the iPods. The iPod is the most popular portable mp3 player on the planet, so Apple must be doing something right with their sales strategies.
The majority of your 99 cents goes to the RIAA. I highly doubt that the RIAA trickles any of that money down to the labels who will spread it out amongst their artists.
The RIAA's cut is exactly $0.00. The money goes to the label, whose job it is to pay the artists. If an artist doesn't want to deal with a big label, they can always use CDBaby and put their music on the iTMS and get a very large cut of the profits.
t'nera semordnilap
You will be proven wrong point by point by Apple zealots, so don't even try.
Everything runs faster, more stable on a Mac. Nothing can complete with the Mac and that's why it's the standard on every single desktop and laptop in the world.
With that said, I think Amazon's Full Text search should have won.
Of course, it's 2004 nearly and the biggest invention to speak of is software to buy music or books. I want my damn hover-skateboard and to take vacations on Mars!!!!
Live web cams
clear case of you not finding the post relevant. You realize slashdot lets you control which headlines you are interested in, so if you aren't interested in apple, then de-select it. simple.
I found this post very useful and very interesting, unlike you.
iTunes fits well into the coolest inventions of 2003, maybe you don't understand why, maybe it's an advertising conspiracy.... I wonder which it is?
Well, that didn't keep them from putting camera phones in there, which have been around much longer than the Segway, at least in Japan.
Here it is: http://www.time.com/time/2003/inventions/invshredd er.html
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
Your numbers are irrelevant. You speak about return, presumably a return on investment (profit/investment). 10% return and 20% return are pretty much equal, because higher return is always negated by higher risk. The article, though, speaks about the profit margin (profit/sales). The profit margin has no direct influence on the attractiveness of the business. For different industries it varies greatly. We have no way to tell whether 10% is a lot, until a serious competition emerges in this market.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The iTunes store sells mp4 (MPEG4) files, which is the new and higher quality open format that supercedes mp3 (MPEG = Motion Picture Experts Group). iTunes will also play mp3's. So it is backward compatible in an open "industry-standard" sense. The fact that it won't play proprietary formats such as Window's Media Player or Real Audio is a necessary cost of adopting open industry standard formats. Apple's approach is the right path away from the literal "tower of babel" of proprietary audio formats. It'll be worth the extra work to be free of the monopolistic proprietary approach you've suffered under with WMP.
ThosEM
not to mention that anything you can replicate with lego's would be hard to image as being the greatest invention of the year.
http://perso.freelug.org/legway/LegWay.html
Who's being monopolistic? Windows Media Player will play its format and MP3. iTunes will play its format and MP3. Unfortunately all of my stuff is in Windows Media Player format. iTunes won't SAVE downloaded files in MP3 format, so I can't play iTunes in WMP (or RealOne, as far as I know, though I don't use that format). Basically we have two siblings who won't talk to each other -- they'll only talk to a third party (i.e. mp3). I should have scanned everything in MP3... but I don't want to go back and rescan. If iTunes is going to make it hard for me to convert (by making me rescan my whole library) then I won't convert at all. Which is my point. If they raise a barrier that requires me to spend my time - which I have a very limited quantity of - to switch from one system to another, then its not worth it to me... especially when, to my ears, iTunes doesn't play music any better or worse. I'd rather buy the same tracks from Napster, for the same price, but be able to play them in WMP. (Napster has roughly the same number of the kinds of tracks that I'm looking for, anyway.)
So Apple invented selling over the Internet? Wow...and here I thought it was merely a refinement of previous efforts. That reality distortion field even effects Time Magazine.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
This isn't accurate. I installed Itunes a week ago on my Win2k laptop. I've downloaded about fifty songs (mostly old tunes I loved as a kid), and played them a lot. I don't own an iPod. I don't even own a Macintosh, although that will probably change when I buy my next laptop.
Further, people who have CD burners can burn purchased songs from iTunes onto an Audio CD that will play in any CD player. I *think* the software limits you to making only ten CDs for each tune, but as far as I know that's the only limit.
Apple apparently is using iTunes to sell iPods, but you definitely don't need an iPod to use and benefit from the iTunes service.
Catherine
Read the article people. They give it credit because Jobs was able to get the music industry to agree to it. Before, they were scared of piracy, and allowed only heavily restrictive DRM. Jobs got them to agree to moderate DRM, and the service has taken off. That is why they are the coolest.
Maybe this will only be a problem until mp4 replaces mp3 as the "MPEG" standard. We might expect MS and Real to eventually adopt the mp4 standard as an alternate source format, unless they are so bitter about Apple's success that they refuse to implement it. But that might be self-defeating if it truly is a better performing format.
I'm not sure why Apple tried to get "ahead of the curve" on file formats, but I assume it must have to do with the higher quality (or smaller size for given quality) of mp4s vs mp3s.
ThosEM
Now look at what a Good Guy goes through: suppose he has a portable player that doesn't know how to play files downloaded from iTunes (as is the case for every single portable player on the market, with the exception one single product: the iPod). He uses iTunes to burn a CDR, then rips the CDR, then encodes it into whatever format his player knows how to play. He's using up a CDR every time he wants to do this, just so he can make one transcoded (with artifacts thanks to twice-lossy encoding) copy of the song. He'll probably do it in batches (10 or so songs per CDR) so he doesn't use CDRs so fast. You don't see this as inconvenient?
I guess it might not be too bad, if you can virtualize the burn-to-CD part to not actually have to use physical media. (I haven't checked to see if this is possible.) If you can "burn" to an ISO image file on hard disk, then it'll be merely stupid, and only slightly (but still gratuitously) inconvenient.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Let's also not forget the other companies Jobs founded.
/. masses to determine.
There's NeXT. Wether that's a plus or minus I'll leave to the
Then there's Pixar. A definite hit. Funny how many people forget he's still CEO of Pixar. Especially when they talk about things like the Rip/Mix/Burn campain indicating Jobs condones piracy.
Does this mean rohypnol has been upgraded?
If Dean Kamen's water purifier can be turned into a still then it might be something to look into. 10 gallons an hour is whole lot of moonshine.
Yeah, I resort to alcohol in seducing women, unlike these new age freaks that use roofies, GHB, and ketamine.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
What a great 2003 invention those have been. Good thing we Americans came up with this brilliant innovation long before the industrious Japanese or the traitorous Europeans. Only with our great tradition of innovation and capitalism could our industries achieve new heights like these camera phones. Long live America!
501 Not Implemented
I am a university student. My mommy bought it for me.
Who cares about the gadgets, just show me the leather bikinis.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Maybe I shouldn't have provided that figure for the lazy people, since you missed the point. I'll spell it out for you: iPods make up 80% of *all* of the hardware mp3-type players out there. You're right, there are hundreds of *kinds* of players, but guess what - only Joe Shmoe runs ShmoeMP3, only Bob Dobbs runs DobbAmp v2.0, etc. Factor out all those, and you've got iTunes for Mac, iTunes for Windows, WinAmp, WMPlayer, and Real Player. 2 of those software players play the AAC files that are used on the #1 dominant hardware player, the iPod... which was the point of my link. I don't give a crap about the software, we're talking hardware, particularly since the software is all free - it's the hardware, and the money you pay into it, that lock you into a solution.
Here's another take - look at the Dell player. It can't play the open-standard MPEG-4 audio files that the #1 dominant player, with 80% of the market can play. Instead, it plays some sort of closed-standard proprietary WMA files (and the MP3 and WAV which both can play. No AAC, though).
Again, yes, 80% of the hardware players out there can play AAC files. Give it a year or two, and 19% of the rest will be able to, too, with firmware updates. That's the nice part of open-standards like MPEG-4.
Surely you're joking. A Bad Guy would just burn the CD once with iTunes. After that, iTunes' limitations and the concept of "playlists" would be irrelevant, because the information would be in an unprotected format. They could then make 10000 copies of the CD, or re-rip it and upload it to a p2p network. He's slightly inconvenienced by the burning step, but that's something he only goes through once per 10000 copies.
Re-ripping takes time. Nonetheless, yes, once the "bad guy" has the Redbook CD, he can put it into a high-speed mass-duplicator and burn away. I fail to see how this reflects poorly on AAC or iTunes.
Now look at what a Good Guy goes through: suppose he has a portable player that doesn't know how to play files downloaded from iTunes (as is the case for every single portable player on the market, with the exception one single product: the iPod).
When you say it like that, you're putting horrible spin on your argument. "Every single portable player on the market, with the exception of one single product: the iPod". Come on now. As I've said, and as I showed in that link you never clicked, 80% of the marketshare belongs to iPod. So, let's just revise and continue:
Now look at what a Good Guy goes through: suppose he has a portable player that doesn't know how to play files downloaded from iTunes (such as one of the many players that collectively make up 20% of the market, but individually only account for a few percent each).
He uses iTunes to burn a CDR, then rips the CDR, then encodes it into whatever format his player knows how to play. He's using up a CDR every time he wants to do this, just so he can make one transcoded (with artifacts thanks to twice-lossy encoding) copy of the song. He'll probably do it in batches (10 or so songs per CDR) so he doesn't use CDRs so fast. You don't see this as inconvenient?
Not terribly because...
I guess it might not be too bad, if you can virtualize the burn-to-CD part to not actually have to use physical media. (I haven't checked to see if this is possible.) If you can "burn" to an ISO image file on hard disk, then it'll be merely stupid, and only slightly (but still gratuitously) inconvenient
Yes, you can. Right within iTunes, in fact. There's a "convert to..." selector that converts the track and resaves it on the hard drive. No CDs necessary.
-T
Troll or not, this brings up a good point - there are certain bands that are in all likelyhood never going to show up on a pay music service like iTunes. Apple records is still battling Apple computer after all these years, so no beatles. Metallica is still a big opponent to online music, so no Metallica - and so on. Bring back the original Napster so I can download like its 1999!
Hmm, that's odd, I've never had it recreate the registry key after I deleted it.
However, that being said, iTunes leaves far too much clutter around. Not only does it automatically start QuickTime on bootup, it also starts up an iPod executable (even though i don't own an iPod) as well as GEARSecurity CD-RW service (even though I don't currently have a CD-RW drive). If you stop the CD service then iTunes complains every time you boot it up.
All of these can be disabled if you know how, but they are things that shouldn't be installed in the first place.
I won't correct any of your grammar or spelling mistakes, but will merely state you have more than most other things I've read in weeks.
As far as comparisons go, you are comparing two items that cannot be compared. iTunes and iTMS provide the legal means to obtain music and to listen to what you have.
The P2P networks provide a distribution channel, for content, whether it's illegal or legal is unknown, but there is a good case most of it is illegal.
We are not debating legalities or moral stances on whether it is legal or not, that is not the scope of this conversation, nor of this post.
iTunes is not a P2P application, thus your comparison is not valid. The reason why iTunes is the coolest app is simple. It brings the simplicity of a real retail store to the average computer user. That feat alone requires a lot of thought.
Not a single open source product has achieved this, and not a single P2P offering, as you insist on arguing, offers it either. iTMS is the only application/store/1-click/online offering that comes close to replacing online retail stores.
For now anyway. There might be others but iTMS is the first, and so far, the most popular.
But I see why you don't see the software lockin as being a big deal:
Tragic. And surprising, in 2003. The Microsoft years taught you nothing? Open format + proprietary wrapper = proprietary format.They'll be able to play some AAC files. But they won't be able to play the files downloaded from iTunes music store, without some sort of proprietary software (available on only two platforms -- yeah, I know what you'll say: the software is available to 80% of the market) to decrypt them before loading it onto the hardware players.
That is why iTunes for Windows was a noteworthy product. Until then, Windows users could not play music they downloaded from iTunes music store, despite the availability of AAC players. And they still can't unless they use that software.
You flame that atrocity from Dell, but I wonder: What if Microsoft made some software for Windows (and gave it away for free) that converted WMA files to MP3? Your iPod would then be able to play music that you bought from a store that sold only WMA files. Would you then consider WMA to be a tolerable standard? 80% of the market would be able to play them.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But American cultural arrogance and hegemony? As usual, when it looks like a conspiracy, it's more often short-sightedness. The record labels just don't get it, they're living in past models of distribution. Even when someone cajoles them around to seing a way that works, they're hanging onto their old mindset. There's your arrogance. It's more like idiocy.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I was just poking fun at the fact that all the models on there weighed about 60 lbs... apparently some people took it differently ;)
Sorry, no - this *does* address the RIAA's concerns. That's why they signed on to it. That was the point, not to provide intrusive DRM for the fun of it - it was to shut the RIAA up and get them to join the project, which they never would have done if Apple was selling .m4a files (or mp3, or Vorbis, etc.) instead.
Tragic. And surprising, in 2003. The Microsoft years taught you nothing?
Oh, you're one of those... The ones that say that Apple is a monopoly because you can only use the Mac OS on Mac computers. .m4p is an open-standard. Anyone can get the white papers from the MPEG group and write their own codec... and in a year or so, you'll see a whole bunch supporting AAC... which leads to your next incorrect point:
Anyways, the point is that
Open format + proprietary wrapper = proprietary format.
Guess what? The open format is MPEG-4. MPEG-4's audio layer, using AAC, has DRM built into it. .m4a files are MPEG-4. .m4p files are also MPEG-4. There's nothing remotely proprietary about them. They have copy protection, yes, but the way that copy protection works is completely, 100% open. The key is stored on a secure server, but the standard itself is *100% open*.
That is why iTunes for Windows was a noteworthy product. Until then, Windows users could not play music they downloaded from iTunes music store, despite the availability of AAC players. And they still can't unless they use that software.
Yes, you're right. But it's still an open standard. Look, you're on Slashdot, therefore you know about the GPL, right? Open licensing, but still protection of the intellectual property. That's essentially what this is. The protection, the 'key', is what you're paying for. The format, however, is completely open, and thus if other companies either sell their own .m4p files and use their own servers for the keys or license Apple's servers to use the iTMS songs/keys, they also can use the DRM side of MPEG-4.
You flame that atrocity from Dell, but I wonder: What if Microsoft made some software for Windows (and gave it away for free) that converted WMA files to MP3? Your iPod would then be able to play music that you bought from a store that sold only WMA files. Would you then consider WMA to be a tolerable standard? 80% of the market would be able to play them.
No - because then you've got 80% of the market having to transcode rather than 20%.
-T
It's either not really open, or it doesn't work. I have a hunch that if it were open, then someone other than Apple would have written an "iTunes for Windows" type program before Apple released their version.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Hey, it was TIME magazine that made the call. Not some geek with a collection of OS release t-shirts.
You should call the editorial staff of TIME magazine FUCKING RETARDS if you are going to open your mouth at all. Mac users are not to blame.
BTW, this Mac user's I.Q. tested at 155. What's yours?
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
Just because some of you prefer to use lower quality software and non-intuitive buggy crap does't mean that us Mac users are retards. I know fellow mac users that could run circles in unix knowledge and/or programming knowledges and I also know mac users who know nothing beyond clicking their icon in the dock. Truth is..you can go any way you want in the Mac world, even if you just want something that 'just works'.