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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!)
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Derek Sivers, CD Baby
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
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.
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