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iTunes One Year Anniversary Sparks Comparison
An anonymous reader writes "CNet News is running a story about the upcoming one year anniversary of Apple's iTunes service. It gives a pretty good summary of the year in online music, with a nice chart comparing each service's user base now and then. The most interesting quote in the article is from a record executive stressing that the industry is quietly hoping that the online music stores will start selling songs in compatible formats. As a sidenote, the headline story at the beginning is based off this page."
Since the first two Slashdot stories about CD Baby getting independent music into Apple iTunes (see iTunes Indie Meeting Notes and Sell Your Music on iTunes Music Store) - things are starting to standardize.
It's actually really interesting watching this happen, from a tech point of view. These big companies appear to have their stuff together from the outside, but I've had quite a few conversations where the techies at the big giant download music service are asking us, Uh... what do you recommend? How are the other companies doing it? Others say things like, This is how Universal Music sent us their catalog - so can you just imitate that? And voila! Watching new standards form.
I get the feeling that immediately after the initial announcement of Apple iTunes, and their 1-million downloads, lots of companies felt they just had to jump in as fast as possible, without any time to think out the long-term strategy. That's part of the reason why they're so incompatible. No time to communicate with others. (And plenty of paranoia about revealing their plans, I'm sure.) Things are settling and standardizing now, though.
Anyway, as you can tell I'm a very open guy, and this summer I'm going to take the time to do some detailed technical write-ups of all the things that go on behind the scenes (including our cool 40-terabyte digital audio warehouse). It's pretty interesting stuff.
(For details of what we do, see the CD Baby Digital Distribution page. Tell any good artists you know who want to get their music onto these services!)
--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby
Will they get their single format? Every provider will have their own format/agenda to push. Some will want DRM, others will have alternatives, users will want more freedom, geeks will want the freedom plus more freedom, etc.
And I still don't see people paying for it all. I haven't bought a CD in 5 years. Most people I know went through their big CD-buying years in their late teens, and most of these people don't have the credit cards required to buy up big at online music stores. Sure, I'd bet that stores have features allowing parents and relatives to set up accounts with $50 to splurge on music as a gift, but that's still not a way for kids to easily take their cash from flipping burgers and spend it impulsively on music.
Are (m)any artists releasing MP3-laden CDs to physical music stores and selling them there?
Are the RIAA looking anything BUT greedy when they take away the physical cost of producing an actual CD and liner-notes, and then want to increase the price of a music track online?
Or maybe it's all in the marketing. I work online day in and day out, and I've never even considered buying music online. I just do without. My girlfriend listens to a lot of new/pop music as it comes out, and the first thing she'll say to me with regard to it is something like "Hey, can you download x for me?". The marketing of online music sales must be at a pretty low level on radio stations and television (zilch in Australia).
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
None of the RIAA-approved DRM systems right now plays ball on Linux, period. I know most people who drink the GNU/Kool-Aid absolutely hate DRM because all content should be free, but that just ain't happening any time soon...
So, while Linux tries to capture the desktop environment, this is one piece of technology that is popular on the Windows and even Macintosh platforms, but just simply isn't on Linux. Open Source projects just aren't going to fit the bill here, somebody needs to convince the DRM people that they'll be safe in writing decoders for Linux.
Is there any way that a DRM-compliant music player could survive in the Linux world without risking being captured in the unencrypted digtal form... or is this something Linux just will never be able to do?
I used to download almost 5 full albums every week illegally and once itunes came out I started buying music. I become addicited to things, and I recall purchasing almost 15 albums from itunes in ONE day!
Now, having to burn and re-rip songs to get them onto my flash based player and the increasing cost of albums (Dark Side Of The Moon is 16.99 for _9_ songs) what is my incentive to be legal anymore? It is currently less effort for me to get the album off of a kazaa then spending an hour to make nearly $20.
-eric
... and other russian LEGAL services are conspicuously absent.
Here's some food for thought (I understand that this is common and not just in b-school). I am a business major at UConn and my management professor insists upon keeping her test questions secrets outside of the classroom. If a student is caught distributing questions from past exams (and these are exams given through a web browser), they will be cited for academic dishonesty. The reason? These are supposedly valuable test questions that have been used over and over again and do not cause students to complain about unfair wording, etc. Now, I think the real reason is laziness combined with a disregard for the academic environment. She wants me to take time out of my schedule to review the test at her convenience because she doesn't want to do more work. There's a parallel to this article here.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this whole idea of proprietary information is simply being taken too far in our society. It is now common for people to grasp at any hint of value they see in their information, capitalize on it, and try to lock others out at the same time. They will then proceed to hoard this information for as long as they are capable. The real innovators in the business world will always have a place as they have value. For every one of them, there are ten parasites (Darl & Company?) who merely create an illusion of value but contribute nothing useful to society.
Why have so many different file formats developed over the years? Perhaps a programmer can help me out here, but what would have been so difficult about making an open format that could handle anything you threw at it? For example, an open text file format that could be extensible to handle Word's change tracking and other features. These days with the proliferance of XML parsers, couldn't one write programs that would read/generate XML files, silently ignore unknown tags and would just work? I understand that the file formats associated with digital music are much more complex, but even considering the 'need' for DRM, where's the collaboration that makes businesses work more efficiently and offer enhanced value to the customer? It's very disappointing, and I can tell you that at least at this school, nobody even mentions a subset of this broad issue. It should be a required course in my opinion. Thanks for reading.
The most interesting quote in the article is from a record executive stressing that the industry is quietly hoping that the online music stores will start selling songs in compatible formats.
Why not strong arm the media playes to support more formats and let the fucking consumer decide?
I'm sick of the all the special formats. As the consumer (rather, a potential consumer) I should be able to determine the format I want. I choose 192k mp3s. I already have 10,000+ mp3s, all between 128 and 192, if I am going to buy music it has to fit with the rest of collection. Some of these formats are horrendous, like wma. Get some quality in there, please!
releasing itunes for a platform that commands over 90% of the market counts as clever? Huh. I would have went with obvious...
Apple's number one goal is to increase the number of Mac users out there. What happened during the two years where iPods were exclusively for Macs was that you saw some people buy a Mac just so they could get an iPod. Then (and I remember reading this in an interview with Jobs in Rolling Stone), Apple had to make a conscience decision on whether it was more important to leverage iPods to increase Mac sales or whether they should try to dominate the MP3 Player market. They decided the latter, and and it has turned out to be a good decision.
So it was a obvious choice to make it compatible on Windows for an MP3 Player company. For for a company like Apple who's main product is the computer, the choice wasn't so obvious.
Little Bricklets
Shame that the iTunes music store is only available in the USA. The rest of the world has to put up with stores that supply music in the WMA format.
Apple is, as we speak, repeating the mistake it made in the PC realm, only this time in the digital content arena. Don't get me wrong, I love their products (own 3 Macs and an iPod), but they just don't understand the dynamics at work here.
Consider where they are right now with iPod/iTunes/ITMS:
Now re-read the above, only now as a description of where they were in 1980/81 with respect to the Apple ][ and the PC industry they had recently created.
Apple is still failing to understand the critical importance of owning the platform. In this case, whoever ends up controlling the DRM technology is going to control the digital content universe. And this will eventually include all movies, TV, books, and anything that can be digitized. By locking out every other vendor from using Fairplay, they are virtually guaranteeing their irrelevance in the DRM endgame.
For Apple to have a chance here, they need to:
Just this past week Apple snubbed Real, which will push the rest of the industry that much closer to Microsoft's WMA. MS, for their part, are crystal-clear on how to win a platform war. I predict that in three years Apple will have Superbowl ads encouraging us to break from the DRM shackles of Big Brother and return to their platform. Yeah, right.
Just had to get that off my chest. I hate to see good companies make bad decisions.
When I was a teenager was in the days of 8-bit home computers and games on cassette. Originally they were easy to copy, you just loaded the game up and then saved it again on another tape. My group of friends bought very few original games, and those we did we shared with everyone. Then they put rudimentary copy protection on the tapes. You couldn't do load/save copying anymore. Tape to tape audio copying was possible, but even that was made more difficult after a while by cunning copy protection mechanisms. Now people had to crack games or get a set up with a couple of good tape machines in order to copy them. It wasn't impossible, but it wasn't a casual matter anymore. And we started to just buy the original game more often, rather than mess about.
Technological means will not stop the major 'pirates', they will just serve to annoy customers.
Nothing will stop the dedicated pirates, both professional and amateur. It's the casual copier that DRM combats. Take a look at the figures in the article. P2P illegal file sharing is much higher right now than legal downloading. But it isn't really growing anymore. Legal downloading (with DRM) is very much in it's early days still, but is growing rapidly. In a years time it will probably have overtaken P2P, and go on to be much bigger than it. P2P isn't going to be stopped, it's just going to become an irrelevant activity for the dedicated cheapskate.