MP3 Winners and Losers for 2003

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Menta over at MP3newswire.net just posted his annual winners and losers list in digital music for last year. The big winner is Apple for dominating MP3 portable player sales and the dramatic success of its iTunes service. Napster savior Roxio and the small independent record labels also made the winners list. The losers list include SonicBlue and MP3.com. Interestingly, Ogg Vorbis made the losers list, not because of the codec per se, but because iTunes has both catapulted the AAC format to number two and stimulated Microsoft to pour more of its efforts ($$$) into WMA and the iTunes clones, leaving little room left for the open source alternative. The 2001 and 2002 winners list are worth a look too and each have links to that year's losers list."

Comments

Re:True to a point...

[NDPTAL85]

The Neuros is huge, the iPod is small. You can use MP3's on both the iPod and the Neuros. Perhaps 1,000 people have significantly large enough Vorbis music collections to warrant an Ogg compatible player.

iPod wins.

Now as to why Apple users cheer the Open Source community its simple. With Apple we get the best of both worlds. The openess of free software with the polish of proprietary excellence. No wonder a lot of Linux/BSD folks have shelled out for iBooks and Powerbooks when they could have saved money and bought Dell Inspiron's and slapped Debian on them.

At the end of the day you want something that just works