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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."
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that one of the original arguments against Vorbis adoption was "But all the MP3 hardware out there uses a dedicated MP3 decoder chip, so they can't just 'upgrade the firmware' to support Vorbis", along with countless other arguments that deal with the fact that in any given project, 1 codec is easier to deal with than many.
Well, because we now have MP3, AAC, and WMA, all becoming popular, that means that instead of hardcoded support for 1 format, any company that's serious about making music software or hardware is probably going to want to support a plugin style architecture, which means that supporting a 4th, 5th, 6th, etc, format becomes much easier, so things like FLAC and Vorbis have one more barrier to entry removed from their paths.
The Free desktop that Just Works
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Yes, we'll all start to whine and complain but there is no way to stop it.
Without DRM to whole business chain of the entertainment industry is fucked. So they'll enforce it.
With this background fact, you won't wonder that OGG was turned down. The encryption shemes will make sure that the song only play on certificated players. However a player which supports formats which can be used to illegal copies will never get such a certification. So the manufacturers will avoid these formats at all cost.
When you watch this development the original movitivation of the OGG development team seems to very naive and economically clueless. While there might be some niche applications for OGG, it will be useless for the downtrodden masses. Basically the development of OGG has merely an academic value.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
How come there was no mention of Emusic on the loser list? They switched to a much more restrictive user agreement and had a mass exodus of their subscribers.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
For choosing WMA, for endorsing WMV.
Why?
Because Microsoft isn't a team player. There is no real technical benefit to WMA or WMV: All the 'next gen' codecs are better (ogg, wma, aac) than mp3, so the only real advantage to WMA is secondary.
Do you trust Microsoft? I don't. By using WMA, you give them more power and more clout, and like any big organization with the power to dictate international and national standards... I don't trust them. Unless of course you *like* paying taxes. Instead of money, though, Microsoft collects in marketshare and power.
Anyway, I hope you like living in a Microsoft future... I'm trying to avoid that, myself.
GPL Deconstructed
Because on my box I've got vorbis files, but there seems to be a distinct lack of ACC and WMA files.
Ah, I get it. You mean little room left in the commercial, RIAA endorsed online music store field.
What has that got to do with an open source solution? Is there "no room" for Linux because of all the money Apple and MS are pouring into their operating systems?
Open Source means will continue to serve very well for Open Source ends.
KFG
Huh? If you're married to Linux, you probably go the whole open-source, patent-free hog and go with OGG. And if you're married to MacOS you probably like iTMS and AAC.
From the article:
The big winner is Apple for dominating MP3 portable player sales and the dramatic success of its iTunes service.
The dramatic success is Apple using its iTunes service to promote its iPod. iTunes has made a miniscule amount, purely a leader for the iPod. The iPod was here before iTunes, iTunes was envisaged as a way to make iPods more successful. iTunes was as much as a breakthrough on the music distribution scene as MP3 players were on the musical device scene were, but iPod deserves the praise, if iTunes weren't here another would have filled the gap, iPod and other MP3 players created the inertia and it is them that should get the praise.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
The consumer - we get sued, screwed, and DRM'd out of our right to enjoy the music we purchase the way we want to.
No, the only reason to use WMA is if you're married to Windows. You won't get much use out of it outside that little circle...
I'm being facetious but it's true!
Any and all Linux users can use the full suite of Apple software under Mac OS X; all you need is a Mac. Sure, that forces you to run OS X, but at least you can run OS X under Linux through MacOnLinux.
And the BSD folk will have to settle for OS X itself, which is a flavor of BSD...
The desktop software produced by Apple isn't free, as in beer, or free, as in liberty, but free as in concession: You give and they give, and both win.
Or you can run Windows under VMWare...
Apple's goal is not OS equality (which is why they don't offer their software on all OSes, as that requires tremendous QA resources) or OS alternatives... they only care about making money, and making happy customers. That's it.
If you want to be an Apple customer, you need Apple product. That means hardware+software, or Windows+iTunes. They aren't a charity, any more than you are.
GPL Deconstructed
> I recently started ripping everything in either lossless WMA (archives) or 160 WMA (for portable player)
so, just because YOU used it to rip your music, it has won?
there are many open source lossless compression schemes (FLAC, ape, etc.) that not only compress better, they also work on multiple platforms
also, at pretty much any bitrate, vorbis wipes the floor with wma.
the chance of wma being used for the next generation video is slim compared to others.
Apple got the DRM right:
Sure, if all you care about is the iPod and iTunes. Good luck playing those compressed files on any non-apple product.
You have to manually go through the process of burning all your music to CDs and then ripping it back if you want to listen to it on something else. I'd consider that VERY restrictive DRM.
Also by the way this is only partly to do with AAC. Anyone can license AAC (for $$$, certainly more than Apple pays but that's not the point). It doesn't matter what they're compressed with or who may or may not support the codec. The files are encrypted and that's why only Apple's products can decode them.
Would you buy CDs that only play on Philips CD players? Of course not. People will see the light as more competing audio products enter the fold, and ITMS will die because people won't want to be limited to using the files (or burning CDs) on Apple's equipment only.
To be honest, it is one of the stupidest names I have ever heard. I'd feel embarassed about telling someone about my "Ogg Vorbis" collection.
Why would I buy it for? I don't think it's worth buying an expensive MP3 player in order to listen to crappy songs. One way or another, I refuse to encourage the RIAA.
It will be a beautiful day when the argument isn't whether or not to install Windows or Linux, but rather, which version of Linux.
I would disagree with you for practical and philosophical reasons.
From a practical standpoint, Linux doesn't support ACPI very well, especially on laptops. Windows XP has elevated power management to a very useful place and will remain on my laptop, however grudgingly, until ACPI is truly supported under Linux.
From a philosophical standpoint, I don't want Windows to go away for the same reason that I don't want Linux or Apple to go away. Competition is good. Choice is good. Once the Windows hegemony is broken there's no real harm to Microsoft staying around competing in the marketplace based on merit not might. In fact, I believe that would be the healthiest situation we could hope for. Imagine the richest company in the world dedicating their R&D budget to actually creating the best OS possible in order to compete with Linux, Apple or any other OS out there.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
I think that a Vorbis only player would be great, but we would need better reasons to do that.
Primarily, no expensive license issues.
If you have software that transcodes from MP3/WMA/Whatever, you'll need a license to decode these anyways so the expensive license issues are still there.
Vorbis-decoding can be done using only integers (FLAC too?), which must save some hardware costs.
Again, while Vorbis and FLAC can be decoded with intergers only, so can MP3 (http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/).
So it wounldn't be much cheeper (because licensing costs still exsist) to make a Vorbis only player compared to a MP3+WMA+AAC+whatever player. In fact, it probably would be more expensive to make a Vorbis player because there are not many off-the-shelf parts or ready-made software out there, which ends up with higher development costs.
Maybe a better solution would be to have the open source/hardware community come up with an open Vorbis player with economy on the mind. Then you can pitch that all the R&D has been done for them so that that company X simply has to build and package the device, kinda like Linux distrobutions are today.
IMO, the Neuros is much better then the iPod. Is cheaper and the battery replacement is from $0 - $12 depending on if it is in warranty or not, which is much cheaper then Apple's $50 or so.
---------
It's also very large. My iPod slips discretely into my pocket, while the Nomad Zen (which is smaller than the Neuros by a good bit) makes an uncomfortable bulge. The Rio Karma is similarly unpocketable, because it is wider and thicker than the iPod. And I refuse to wear cargo pants!
As for price, the iPod is well worth it. When I bougt my iPod, the only other choice was really the Nomad Zen, and it was $50 less for 5 more GB. Not really a big enough savings to outweigh the build-quality and size of the iPod in my opinion. And even if you have to replace your battery every 18 months (the vast majority of people don't have to do so, however) that's a cost of about $33 a year. Hardly a burdensome expense for a several-hundred-dollar device.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The MP3/AAC licensing costs are miniscule compared to the cost of the rest of the components. It's probably in the range of 50c - $1 per device, or less.The cost of the RAM/HD is 100x any licensing costs.
The file transfers would be disgustingly slow because of the overhead required to transcode every file to the machine. And it would need proprietary software to put music on it (to do the transcoding) which is one of the few complaints people have about the iPod.
Vorbis is nice, but it is inferior, sound quality wise to WMA Pro, AAC, and MusePack, and it's never going to be popular (in a marketshare sense). I know it hurts to hear it, but it's true.
"Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3"
It just rolls right off the tongue...
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I dunno, I kinda think the Neuros is better than an iPod in the sense that a Chevy Cavalier is better than a Volvo S60.
In that if you can't afford the build, design, usability, and style, then saving some money is probably worth it. You can get more features at less price!
GPL Deconstructed
Excuse me, but how does DVD sales going up correlate with "winning" because of mp3s? Isn't it true that every year more and more people own DVD players, in the home, on their computer. So lets see, "Oh, DVD is a winner cause the sales went up. MP3 is the cause of that!" What kind of conclusion is that? If more people own DVD players compared to last year, naturally DVD sales are going to go up as well.
True, DVD is lossy, but at least get the facts straight: DVD uses MPEG-2, not MPEG-4, and its resolution does make sense in the overall scheme of things, since it matches that of its usual destination, a TV. Also, DVDs can encode movies using progressively-scanned frames and simply mark the video stream to be telecined into the interlaced output that most TVs need.
...the spread of the bars on the graph represents the uncertainty of the results, so (even according to those who performed the test and discussed it on HydrogenAudio) it's only fair to declare that one codec is conclusively worse than another when its entire spread lies below another codec's spread. Therefore, the only thing that's for sure is that MP3 is worse than the others. I don't know which samples favor which codecs, but a different set of test samples could have yielded slightly different orderings of the non-MP3 codecs.
That being said, market share is far more of an issue than sound quality.
A few comments on the winners:
>3. Archos
>Continues to own the MPEG 4 video portable
>business with the release of the excellent
>Archos AV320.
Everything I've read/seen/used leads me to believe that the device has an an awful UI. Featurewise it is excellent, but that doesn't necessarily make it an excellent product. Plus, it's %$@% expensive, even for what it is.
>A peek at the future where services like Napster
>and iTunes may soon sell digital files of
>individual TV episodes for $0.50 each
Right, except that iTunes will use some sort of apple-specific (a la ACC) format that won't work on Archos' players, and since you've just told us that iTunes is going to kill everyting in it's path, what's the point?
>7. Roxio
>A healthy promotional campaign along with the
>name recognition has propelled the new service
>to a clear number two to iTunes in the downloads-
>for-sale game.
In what universe is it reasonable to even begin to figure out a number two in this space? It's in its infancy right now, and the landscape three or six months from now probably won't look much like the landscape today. That's even assuming that we ignore the fact that *all* of these services currently lose tremendous amounts of money for their owners, and many will probably soon cease to exist. Napster's new portable player has zero traction right now, and they're still looking down the barrel of the iTunes-AAC-proprietary go-to-hell gun.
A few comments on the losers:
>3. WMA Format
>Even though its use was way behind that of the
>MP3 format, Microsoft's WMA was still a clear
>number 2 - until iTunes came along. Within the
>first few weeks WMA went from place to show,
>supplanted as Apple sold millions of tunes in
>their proprietary version of the competing AAC
>format.
(...)
>The codec wars have started.
No they haven't. There is no codec war. There is an Apple vs. Everything Else , or an AAC vs. Everything Else war. Continued dominance of the iPod is the *only* leverage that Apple has for AAC. I've noticed that absolutely nowhere in this list have any of the new worthy iPod competitors even been mentioned (except briefly in passing) and the author simply assumes the continued massive dominance of iPod, backed up by very little evidence. Also, he completely ignores the flash-based player segment of the market, which is the gigantic monster moneymaker - not HD players.
Don't get me wrong - iPod will still dominate the HD space for a while, but not much longer. There are too many cheaper, better alternatives out there already. Has it not occured to the author that Apple is making the classic Apple mistakes with the iPod?
>6. Ogg Vorbis
>Before iTunes there was only one major digital
>music format - MP3. WMA was a very distant
>second and Ogg Vorbis looked to parlay its open
>source origins into a wide open market and
>become a heavily utilized commercial and non-
>commercial codec
ACC, ACC, ACC! The idea of Ogg Vorbis DRM is almost an oxymoron, and therefore ogg's suitability as a medium for online music sales was always considered to be zero for anybody who had even the faintest idea what they were talking about. Ogg Vorbis is currently a niche codec, but it fills its niche nicely (and will be even better if it can become less of a CPU hog and therefore more suitable to portable devices.)
I'd also like to point out that this guy rambles, as have many others, about the horrible "licensing fees" for mp3 and wma, with respect to portable players. I don't even know where to begin with that statement, other than to say that it's a well-crafted bit of FUD (yeah, go ahead, flame away)
The truth of the matter is that these licenses barely impact the bottom line on devices costing as much as HD players. They are more of an issue with flash-based players, but this author aparently is not aware
I'm just a bit suprised to hear people actually have entire music collections in WMA format. A search of my Windows partition (no point looking for them in Linux) has discovered... three, all of which appear to be the "sample" files that come with Windows XP! I can't remember ever even seeing them on any legal indie music sites like BeSonic, or in peoples collections in any filesharing programs. I don't think I've ever listened to a WMA net radio station - all the good stuff seems to be on streaming mp3 and ogg. Where, in all honesty, are you people getting them from? I guess I'm out of the loop.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!