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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."
[puts on tinfoil hat] I'm sure they'd love that. The saying from LoTR comes to mind:
One Ring to rule them all
One Ring to find them
One Ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.
I wouldn't mind having compatible formats either, I just don't want the RIAA having absolutely any say in it whatsoever, because they don't exactly have the best track record of making decisions which are beneficial to customers.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You just want free music. Go away.
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It's interesting to me the way the three major players have laid out their strategies for digital music...
The Apple camp exists in a silo, as usual. Music purchased at the iTunes Music Store is only playable in iTunes, and only natively transfers to an iPod family portible.
The Real camp is using their proprietary format for audio that only RealPlayer can play in software, and there's only a limited number of portables that are compatible. In fact, only one of those portables is a true music player, the rest are Palm devices because there's a compatible player for Palm.
But Microsoft's only entering into the game as a software provider. That means there's no Microsoft music store, but everybody major other than Apple and Real are using WMA as the secure format of choice, including Napster, Wal*Mart, and BuyMusic. They've also got the largest selection of compatible players.
Really, going the Microsoft route for your DRMed music collection seems like the best answer to me, because you can then shop arround for the best price on single-track buys, and often find the hot songs for 79 or 88 cents. Who says the price of legal music downloads is going up?
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
Wait, releasing itunes for a platform that commands over 90% of the market counts as clever? Huh. I would have went with obvious but I guess we have different clever standards.
and The most interesting quote NOT in the article is from Steve Jobs stressing that he can't possibly make money if the record industry jacks the prices to $2.50/song and bundles crappy songs with good songs, and is quietly scheming to force the music stores to do.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Looking at the comparison table, it isn't fair to list Rhapsody in there, with Rhapsody being a streaming service and almost every other player in there is a download service. Interesting to note that , RealPlayer music store is listed in there too and has a pretty good download number for something that opened just one-two months back.
Rhapsody with a user base of 489,000 is doing pretty good I beleive with each user paying $10 / month . Thats like 4.89 million. Apple is way ahead in the competition with almost double the users compared to its successor.
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
...but iTunes gave me the outlet to do what I wanted to do: LEGALLY BUY MUSIC ONLINE.
*NOW* we have options, but until iTMS, we DIDN'T.
Thanks, Apple, for that at least.
can be a funny thing... Nowhere else you'll find a sucessfull and innovative company compared to a Soviet grocery store, like Real's CEO did. So as a linux-using Communist (in the words of Mr. Ballmer of MS-Fame) I now can buy music in a Soviet Grocery Store located in the USA. Did I miss anything in the Cold War?
but reading the group manager of Windows digital media unit say:
gets me all choked up. Not in the "it brings tears to my eyes" kind of choked up, but the "the irony is so thick I think may I need a Heimlich maneuver" sort.
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.
Fileformats are not the only key to success. I mean, where are all the big European online strores, for example? How many ITMS competitors sell outside US?
I think there are lots of potential customers outside US just waiting the oppoturnity to spend their hard-earned money on good and legal music.
The trick is, the ones that are doing this to sell devices have absolutely no incentive to use a format compatible with other devices. For one thing, they make a trivial amount on the music sale itself. For another, once they've hooked you they want to keep you.
For the music execs, however, it's all about music sales. So clearly it would be better if a consumer could go to any store and have all that music in their combined library. I for one would prefer that, too. It would be so much nicer to have a single media library application that could search and buy from any store simply by installing a plugin.
How can we get them to go in that direction?
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Maybe the problem isn't their selection...maybe it was your spelling.
Linkin Park seems to work...
Shame on Google.
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
How can we get them to go in that direction?
Stop pirating the fuck out of every artists' music on P2P networks for one. We kinda have to show that there's a demand for it.
A lot of execs are probably scared to death of online music stores precisely because so many users use online services to rip them off and pirate everybody's music. No wonder they're hesitant...if people were simply honest and showed an interest in being legal, you'd have what you wanted.
Nice post, but a little out of date, as I see no mention of Poisoned which is a front end to giFT. giFT supports FastTrack (Kazaa), Gnutella, and OpenFT (a hot little network). Personally I'd rather run Poisoned than Kazaa any day.
Furthermore, the BitTorrent community is alive and well on OS X. Azureus works really well, and there's a hot little native client that is better than the standard one.
I've been using the Overnet command line client, which sucks but gets the job done better than the various front-ends floating around.
And then there's Hotline, Carracho, and the new open-source client-server model "Wired".
Enjoy.
Stop pirating the fuck out of every artists' music on P2P networks for one. We kinda have to show that there's a demand for it.
Fuck that. Things always get worse. Look at DVDs. They started out OK--- movies in a clean format, random access, extra features, all good. Once DVDs became popular THEN it was time to fuck it up by pinching every nickel out of the format. First we had unskippable FBI warnings. Then unskippable movie previews. Now we have unskippable ads and previews at the beginning of disks. Combine that with increased product placement in the movies themselves, "enhanced" region encoding and media companies suing the hind legs off companies that make legitimate products like DVD X Copy and at some point you have to say "Enough is enough!" and start pushing back. The IP rights media companies claim were granted by "We the People" and not the other way around. Abuse those rights and you can kiss our collective asses because you have no rights unless the majority of the people think you do.
Enter p2p file sharing. The computer technology that's being used to systematically break the back of the working man is now bringing the working man some dividends in the form of easy copying of any and all media he can get his grubby hands on. One thing corporations have taught us is that there is only one rule and that is to do anything you can get away with it. Live by the sword, die by the sword. If you twist the rules, lie, cheat and steal then you shouldn't be surprised when others follow your example. That's why the media companies can BITE ME. Every dog has his day and ours is today.
But Apple doesn't want to win, at least not in the way you think. Apple wants to sell products to people who are willing to payh more for quality. There are enough of these people to make Apple a very profitable company. When they strayed from this and tried to compete with the likes of Dell they got crushed. If the DRM/media market starts looking like it will be controlled by "da cheapest iz de greatest" crowd, Apple should bow out and leave that wallow to the pigs know it best.