Slashdot Mirror
iTMS Europe: 800,000 Tracks In A Week
no_demons writes "In a press release, Apple has announced that the "European" iTunes Music Store has sold 0.8 million tracks in a week, with around 450,000 being sold in the UK alone. According to Steve Jobs other services were shifting only 50,000 tracks a week in Europe before the launch."
The RIAA still doesn't understand why singles are selling so well, so sues 428 more people.
I stole this sig.
A lot of people on here were doubting that the UK has much of a Macintosh userbase.
Of the people I know who've used iTMS AND BOUGHT SOMETHING, about half are Mac users and half aren't.
I know a lot more Windows users who've installed it though.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Harumph. At least if I don't own an iPod I am still a part of this Personal Computer Revolution with an old Apple //c sitting on my shelf...
what they don't tell you is that 74% of those downloads were made by Sporty Spice. She d/l'ed thousands of copies of "tell me what you want, what you really, really want" in the hopes of reclaiming some of her former "glory". It's shameful for all Europeans.
not yet up to the 2.5 million a week from the US. Of course, this is the first week and demand ramps up as people sign up and get the tech down pat.
This is good news for Apple (obviously) but what will be more interesting is how this affects iPod sales. We all know the iTunes Music store is a pimp for the iPod, so now that we have a controlled environment that we can monitor closely, I guess we can prove if Apple's music model really works the way they planned.
So while inertia-bound Microsofattempts to shift itself toward its many stated directional goals and moribund music industry giants try to pedal their own wares, puny Apple Computer, with a less than perfect portfolio continues to run rings around these beasts. I'm not exactly a fan of Apple, and find it quite odd that they have branched into music distribution, but I do love these results. Apple is establishing itself well and by the time the competition sorts out its own problems iTunes will be ubiquitous.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What this proves is that Apple is becoming less a computer vendor and more a consumer electronics company. Sure, they still sell computers (I have a 12" PB), but their new focus is becoming clear. The surging price of AAPL only reinforces this new direction.
Lack of competition is not necessarily a good thing. I'm glad that the model of physical-medialess music is taking off, but I'm concerned about how much power Apple/iTunes may end up having in the future if they absolutely dominate the market. Will it be any better than the record industry now? (and don't kid yourself, there may be several "major" labels, but through the RIAA they act as one).
Look at a correlary in the "real world". What if the only place to get music was at your local Best Buy and that just about every other outlet sold orders of magnitude less.
Let's just be careful what we wish for...
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
AOL UK and Apple have a deal to promote to DSL customers throuhg Keyword: itunes, where customers can download itunes :-)
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
Anybody knows if there was any announcement of iTunes coming to Canada eventually?
But then again, I guess they don't count since they're not based in the US, feeding the RIAA corporate welfare lobbying machine. Or maybe they don't count here because they're not technically in euroupe, but rather in Russia which is, as we all know, actually part of Asia. Even 'tho theyre supposed to be part of the EU... or something.
Meh. More hype for the system. You can wrap it in as many colors as you like, Steven, I'm not helping you feed this monster any more.
miniature American flags for others! If anything, the early success of the iTMS in selected european countries indicates a trend that global internet business models can work in selected markets. Yet the internet in its most basic sense is about bringing information (or data, in this case) to all. Rather than simply transplanting the store to countries with similar capitalstic structures, the true "revolution" will be marked by the universal ability to experience the global art of music. Apple has not forged a new beachead. yet.
Guess it didn't really matter that Napster beat Apple to launch there.
I wonder if the RIAA's listening?
As an Apple acolyte I must say, that the UK is doing well to embrace iTMS Europe. France and Germany should follow UKs example.
Only through iTMS will both countries reach the musical zen that UK is about to reach! France and Germany dont despair you need but open iTunes and download more.
Oh here's the obligatory tag for those who missed it...
.... ... }
int main (void) {
A bit off topic, but it will come up anyways, so mod me however you wish:
.ogg for use in UT2004 seemed unnecessarily complex (burn to cd, rip to wav, encode to ogg), and as such I am wondering if a DRM is really necessary. I haven't pirated music in over a year now, and indeed have no such music on my laptop (or iPod) currently: I am now more prone to buy music from iTMS.
I've used iTunes since its inception (on OS 9), and have bought around 30-40 songs since the release of iTMS US (and have also downloaded the countless weekly free tracks). The DRM, while not particularly inconvenient to me (I have a 20GB iPod) seems to be a great sticking point to others. I have never had the need to use my music on more than 3 computers simultaneously, and have never needed to burn a playlist so many times as to exceed the iTunes limit (and even then you can change the playlist and burn again)
That said, the steps necessary to convert my favorite fragging tracks to
I am proud of Apple's successes and hope they go far in the future, but DRM is a dangerous and narrow path, and I only hope that Steve Jobs doesn't take his penchant for control too far with this one. Until that time, the current implementation is sufficient for me, and with new technologies such as Airtunes connectivity and convergence are becoming more mainstream: the need for DRM-less files is becoming less.
However... Apple needs to open their format to other companies. I dont give a damn, Steve, if iPod comprises 50%, 75% or even 100% of the market, if another company wants to use your insanely great AAC Protected format, they should be able to. The fact that consumers cannot use other digital devices to play the product Apple is selling is a major sticking point with many, and the tools necessary to allow this are being intentionally broken with each successive iTunes release.
Yes, I'm a fervent Mac Evangelist, but while this works perfectly for me, getting a friend with another mp3 player to start using a Mac and/or the iTMS is going to be pretty hard if I have to explain to him that he has to break the user agreement to play the files by breaking the DRM.
The format needs to be opened, and it needs to happen soon.
Help a college student
I would not be so sure about that... I personally know a few PC peeps who have iTunes installed and absoluting raving about it to a degree that they admit theyr next purchase to be a Mac. In a year or so, when their current PC is outdated.
the iPods receive short term market share gain from th iTMS, but i think the other Apple hardware will benefit in a year or so.
I'll eat my hat if, over the next 2 years, Apple market share doesn't rise to 150% of what they have now.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Probably has something to do with it. Bam Thwok is exclusive to iTMS, and got a mention in nearly all of the iTunes launch coverage. Considering that the Pixies are currently touring Europe, I'm sure that drove plenty of sales. I for one bought Bam Thwok on iTMS launch day.
At first I assumed iTMS was a rail company laying a lot of new track... :)
Since I don't live in the U.K, France or Germany, and haven't ever bought music from the iTunes store, I guess I don't really have anything to say about this anyway... other than this is really a bit of a non-story, isn't it ?
Even the biggest competition Apple might have had in Europe decided to leave the business rather than compete with Apple on this. The article cites "Apple and Napster", but really, Napster? OD2 was worried about Napster? Somehow I think if it was just Napster, OD2 wouldn't have gone looking for an exit strategy.
On each $0.99 retail Apple charges per song, shares are taken by the copyright holder (artist/label/RIAAbot), the retail outlet (iTMS/Virgin/Songhut), the finance transactor (Visa/telco/Guido) and Apple. What's Apple's share per song, their profit on these huge sales? Do they take a loss, leading sales of iPods and some Macs?
--
make install -not war
Those are some pretty impressive numbers indeed. In one week iTMS is supposedly the most popular music service in Europe now. Here's my question: since there were already other services up and running in Europe, were the European users waiting for iTMS to arrive and then just went nuts when it opened? Or did everyone switch from the other services? Why the huge numbers, which are blowing the other services out of the water, when others were available?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Here's what I've been wondering:
I'm in the US and at the bottom of the iTMS home pages, I can select which country's store I want to see (USA, UK, France, Germany). When I select one, I'm taken to the store.
Can I, from the US, purchase songs from the foreign stores? I know I could try this myself, but I've been a bit leery. Anyone else tried this and have it work or otherwise? Each country store has some unique music not found on the others, and I'd like to buy some of those tracks.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
And the headline reads: All of Europe buys equivalent of 65,000 CDs this week. Europe buys roughly 3 billion recorded music units (PDF) (almost all of which are CDs) a year. Even if iTunes maintained that sales rate (which is extremely unlikely), they'd sell the rough equivalent of 3.4 million CDs a year, or roughly 0.1 % of the total CDs sold. Sure, that'll make a dent in this whole piracy thing.
So what stopped people in the rest of the world from using iTunes? Is this just a mirror site with a euro converter?
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
Each country store has some unique music not found on the others, and I'd like to buy some of those tracks.
Yeah, David Hasslehoff's (search) career should be getting a big boost from this internet music thing, I would think....
yes, imagine how much cheaper it is for him not to have to pay VAT!
several of my mailing list musician friends came to the US from europe for a weekend jam session and a few of them took advantage of the weak dollar and no VAT to purchase multiple alesis ion synths at a few hundred less than they would cost in europe. i think there has even been an ask slashdot about this very topic.
Who does it prove that? Apple is just as much a computer company as they were before.
Just because they're sucessful in another area doesn't make them less of a computer company.... Stop with the FUD.
That's how Microsoft wins. It enters established, proven markets (in most cases), and simply kills other competitors by attrition and being able to withstand financial bloodletting far better than anyone else. Look at the Xbox for the best evidence of this.
That's what Apple says, but be leery of claims like this. Sony and Nintendo said the same thing about their console hardware, just to scare others off of the market. In fact, they made money off their consoles, just not very much. MS then entered the market, and really lost money on the consoles. Successful FUD!
Companies say "loss leader" in an attempt to invalidate the business assumptions of competitors. If you think about it, it's unlikely that iTMS is losing money. It's more likely that they're not making much money.
That phrase is working, though. The "iTMS is not a money maker" is driving others in the industry crazy, because competitors think they need hardware/iPod equivalents. Plus it's being parroted by members of the general public (ie: right here).
I decided to try this myself, you can't buy from the foreign stores. It gives you a message stating that your account is only authorized for purchase in the US.
So, in case anyone else was wondering, there is your answer.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
"from the but-are-those-metric-tracks dept."
yes, complete with iambic pentametres [sic]...
So why exactly would they want to open this up, and help other companies sell devices?
Folks have often argued that they should at least open it up in areas where Apple doesn't yet have a market. They key word people are forgetting when they make this argument is yet.
Again, how is it in Apple's interest to let other companies piggyback onto Apple's extremely difficult (legally, technically), barely-profitable venture that is the iTunes Music Store?
It's like the people who bitch about authorities going to the expense of building bicycle lanes because "I never see a bike using that lane when I drive past every morning."
Anecdotes do not trump statistics.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I just wish iTunes was European, not "European". It's like I started some company on the southern shores of Florida and tell that I have an [U.S.] American service (well, poor example but you get the point). Nonetheless, true to a point, but that point is one I don't like.
:D
:P
/* well this is my first post, hooray, whatever */
I was very happy to hear that iTunes was coming to Europe. Than I was a bit worried about the possibly high prices (well, we've gotten used to that when things come across the ocean to us). Than, when that was cleared up, best of all, turned out Apple's vocabulary and/or geographical knowledge is fairly limited concerning European countries
But hey, I always try to be as positive as I can, so now I hope iTunes will arrive to us before I begin my pensionary years
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
British pound sterling to United States dollar 0.790000 = 1.436807 US$ European Union euro to United States dollar 0.990000 euro = 1.196929 US$
Combine this with that story the other day about railguns, sprinkle with a good dose of paranoia, and you get:
"iTMS Laying Down Tracks So Railguns Can Fire Apples in Europe!"
Hmmm.
[ think ]
I love iTunes, ditched winamp for it when it first came out for windows.....howver I dont love it enough to ditch the REST of my PC software for a mac...
;p
I don't quite get the connection..as if iTunes will be a better experience on a mac or something?
OH and being free helped
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I'm not concerned Apple is successful in another area; in fact, I think that's great. I own an iPod mini and a 12" PB Rev B. 1 GHz. Go Apple!
If you, however, think that because Apple is doing well on its consumer electronics side of the house it automatically bodes well for Apple's PC business, you're a fool. It bodes well for Apple as a commercial entity, and it may or may not bode well for your dual G5 and OSX, depending on what strategic direction Apple eventually chooses.
Apple cannot continue to be marginalized in the PC market and sustain itself. Its market share isn't growing, its losing the educational battle to Dell in spectacular fashion, and a few major software vendors have discontinued support for a number of products. Safari is not a browser other parties develop to, and interesting web endeavors wind up supporting the Mac as a second-tier afterthought (see Gmail). If you argue any of this, you're kidding yourself.
Let's continue: hardware is commoditized fully at this point, and Apple refuses to play in the low-end market. Meanwhile, Dell and other commodity vendors eat a very nice lunch. There are now seperate iPod and PC divisions within Apple, and some analysts have hinted that's in place to more easily transition out of a given business should the corporation decide to do so. Even rumors of Apple's upcoming new displays are indicating that the ADC is gone in favor of DVI, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that that move might play into a larger "consumer electronics" strategy that could cater to the x86 world. In another vein, most users have significant investments in Windows software, so even when it's upgrade time for them, they go back to a commodity x86 vendor, simply because it's cheaper and they don't have to re-purchase and re-learn new software.
But the big problem is this: no way can Apple keep up with OS and hardware R&D at the rate MS, Intel, and AMD do. If Apple's financial investments bear tastier fruit in the consumer electronics business, then dammit, that's where you'll see Apple focus. They're not stupid.
That's because Mac users will actually pay for music. PC users steal all of theirs. :D
(j/k, of course).
Don't forget about the price of the tracks, which are significantly higher in Europe.
US Price: $0.99
UK Price: 79 pence ($1.43)
France/Germany Price: 0.99 Euro ($1.20)
And it's not just tax either - it's a blatant case of price hiking.
Yes, it is better on a Mac. It's integrated with the iPod which works better on a Mac (mounting as an HFS+ disk - even bootable), it's scriptable with Applescript, it's integrated with Airport Express, etc.
Of course, I wouldn't switch to a Mac because of iTunes; I would (and did!) switch for all the other good reasons (UNIX-based, more secure, pretty UI, etc).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The story blurb mentions several articles, not just the Apple PR:
"According to Steve Jobs other services were shifting only 50,000 tracks a week in Europe before the launch."
In that linked article, the interviewer mentions renegotiation, confirmed by Jobs:
'NM: You've gone back to renegotiate with the labels after the first year. Have attitudes changed towards you?
SJ: "Oh sure. Absolutely."'
Apple has revolutionized music retail, undermining the giant retail stores which themselves had wiped out most smaller, local record stores. Through a combination of convenience and pricing. Where's a definitive statement of the actual profitability of the new music retail business Apple is creating?
--
make install -not war
You forget that in these 725 million CDs sold, most of them were probably bought for one or two tracks at most, the rest being filler that people were "forced" to buy anyways.
And considering the quality of the music being sold today, "one or two" sounds about right. Now being overly generous and assuming there are THREE good tracks per CD, on average, you've got about 14 million "CDs" sold, which is about 2% of CD sales of 2001.
Now. It would be fun to see the statistics on CDs for 2003, because I'm pretty sure people are buying less and less music these days, mostly due (in my case) to all the junk they're keeping on store shelves.
Still, for a one-year-old music store, I think it's doing great, and I wish them the best!
The facts are: US law does not universally apply, and Copyright is not some sort of divine right. If you will look around a bit you will see some of the countries with the least restrictive copyright laws have very outstanding artistic histories.
Once again you lot confuse commerce with art. Artists have traditionally sought benefactors and relied on individual sales and performance contracts to generate income. The people who benefit from US copyright law.. blah blah blah blah... we've heard it before
So I'll say it again: look around. Russia has a very loose copyright system and yet they are far from being devoid of artists - nor of plastic pop has-beens. And, in fact, some of the brightest artistic moments from that part of the world came when artists were most persecuted - nor have their very liberal policies cost them their share of post-modern innovation.
I'm not saying we should abuse artists (well, except mimes) but the simple fact is these russian (and Ukrainian - another FSU state that is slated to join the EU) websites are simply exploiting the weakness of the oppression existent in our own economy - no different than when we exploit the labors of those kids who work for a buck a day rolling beedies, assembling hundred dollar sneakers, or putting overpriced plastic dolls in boxes.
So... how does it feel to be exploited by the foibles of your own beliefs?
"Absolutely. Apple sees a chance to reinvent itself and get away from the relatively unsuccessful endeavor of becoming a significant PC player"
Their endeavor is not to be large but instead... profitable. if they can be large and profitable that would be great too, but PC manufacturers HAVE to be large to be profitable because there is no way for any of them to compete on features because each PC manufacturer can copy the others (thats what happens in a comoddity business). As a result, that means they can ONLY compete on price.
Apple is just as inexpensive as any PC manufacturer, but they require you to buy more... so therefore you will pay more. Of the computer that you are buying more, is elements that diferentiates Apple from PC competition.
and in the process jump on an opportunity to establish itself as a heavyweight in consumer electronics."
They are able to jump into the consumer electronics BIZ because this is an area that is not been pre-educated by Microsoft that offering a better solution from a single company is somehow bad.
In essence, Apple is showing that a single company can in fact produce a superior solution... thus reinforcing their computer matra that they've been saying all along.
"Good call, if you ask me, even though it could, someday, bode poorly for my PowerBook."
You or your powerbook have nothing to fear. Apple will continue to be a computer company for as long as it can remain profitable doing so. Considering the fact that they are one of the last remaining computer companies that is profitable from selling computer hardware (the other being Dell) I'd say that it will be as long as the industry is interested in buying computers.... and it wont expire prematurely.
That means Apple is dying!!
If you think about it, it's unlikely that iTMS is losing money.
...
If you really think about it, you'll realize you have no idea what the costs are for iTMS. Let's say they are still selling 100,000 songs a day. (I couldn't find anything more recent then a year ago with numbers.) Most average estimates peg them getting 10 cents a song, so that's $10,000 a day. That's their income.
Their daily costs will include server farms (at cost, but a loss from sales), system administrators (fewer then Windows/Linux, but not 0), internet bandwidth for streaming music AND videos, and an administration staff for obtaining new music, installing new music, handling complaints, accounting issues, developers of both Mac and Windows clients,
Now there is iTMS Europe. Multiply that by some factor between 1 and 3 {however much it takes to run the store in additional languages and tax/import accounting}, and keep in mind that for at least the past 6 months they had no money coming in to offset it.
It's most likely that iTMS varies wildly from a loss to a gain from month to month. Any corporate endeavor can easily be described as losing money when compared with an expected average return on investment, even if it happens to make more than $0 in the absolute over a short term.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Just curious, does Apple deliver iTunes Europe purchases from servers in the U.S. or do they have a European server farm for that ? Is global connectivity now good enough that servers in California can deliver that volume of data around the globe to Europe at about the same throughput and latency as could servers located in Europe ?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I don't see any reason to believe that this related to DRM. It seems much more likely that Apple simply hasn't implemented the ability to split up protected tracks very well.
For example, I haven't heard it complained about much, but when fast user switching came out in OS X, you couldn't run iTunes in more than one active user. At first, I thought this was related to DRM, but in later versions of OS X 10.3 this is no longer a problem.
Perhaps this is just something that not enough people have complained about, so Apple hasn't gotten around to fixing it yet.
right, because the Xbox won... what's its market share, again?
Um...couple of problems with your argument here, methinks.
First off, Netscape didn't have nearly the name recognition that Apple, the iPod, and iTunes do. By the time M$ has something that might be able to compete, featurewise, The People will probably know iTunes as the best music store, and want it rather than whatever M$ preinstalls/bundles/force-feeds/whatever.
Secondly, I wouldn't use the XBox as a comparison. It's not dying, but it's hardly whipping the competition. If there were as many XBoxes as PS2s out there, I'd agree with you, but the XBox just isn't successful enough to be used as an example for this strategy.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I've never heard this before, does this hack really work? It seems like a glaring omission on Apples part to allow this rather than supporting protected AAC's in iMovie.
If I buy a whole album from iTunes it'll cost as much or more than purchasing a CD. I should get CD quality for my money, or why not just go halves on a CD with a friend?
Blar.
Face facts. People who buy *can't* meaningfully tell that it is 128kbps, or don't care.
If they did, it wouldn't sell. It does sell; therefore the price and convenience outweight the quality and sound.
GPL Deconstructed
I didn't realise she had so many family members. Well, you know what they say about Northerners...
Does my bum look big in this?
meta mod +1, calling a spade a spade.
If you WANT to discuss ethics, fine - then how do you justify "paying more for less" when it comes to the music industry? You really think it's noble to pay $20 a CD (or a buck a track) to an organization that is constantly lobbying for more ways to make sure you and eveyone else are forced to pay them even more money in the future? What kind of fucked up values system is that?
how many times have you seen:
oh there is this new new thing lets try it out...
so I would like to know how many are returning customers
I registered but could not find the music I wanted and I support apple in offering the same contract to all record labels and bands
so off I go to rip it off a mate (the p2p is frankly awful for music now)
regards
John Jones
You are correct. The 128kbps AAC files that Apple sells are about equal in sound quality to a 160/192kbps MP3 file. The MP3 codec was designed to eliminate from the file certain music frequencies that the human ear CANNOT hear. People are always bitching about Ogg and how they like lossless formats, well here is a news flash, you cannot tell the difference between the Ogg and the same file encoded in MP3 on your 100$ speaker "system" or your 30$ headphones. Realistically, only a 3000$ Bose system or greater would show a clear difference. (In most cases, the player actually limits the audio quality more than the file, i.e. the analog audio out/headphone jack on your iPod/discman).
I don't quite get the connection..as if iTunes will be a better experience on a mac or something?
No, it's the realization that your entire computing experience will be better with a Mac, not just the music stuff.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Really? Other than my mother, I don't know of anyone who uses iTunes on Windows (and she only does because I installed it on her computer). Everyone else I've talked to is of the opinion that iTunes on the Mac is nice, iTunes on the PC really sucks. Maybe it's improved since I last tried it, but when I was still using Windows I had the same experience. It wasn't properly threaded (iTunes on the Mac runs around 10 threads and feels responsive. On Windows it seemed to only use two so doing something processor intensive would kill the UI). The UI wasn't back buffered, so it flickered horribly on redraws, and it skipped and/or crashed when I tried playing files from a remote Samba share. The only reason I kept using it was so I could re-encode all of my CDs as AAC before my PowerBook and iPod arrived.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Since there is a higher percentage of the population that has computers and internet in Europe it would only make the number even more odd.
In case you wonder why the percentage is higher in Europe, first realise that 25% (a number that falls with the prices) of american "house"-holds can't afford a computer, while the 95% of for instance danish households have a computer (100% of those with children).
It's 0.8 million metric people. It would be 0.31496 million imperial people.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Erm. That's not true.
Check the latest multiformat 128 kbps test. MP3 was tied with AAC (AAC only had a slight advantage, but technically they were tied, check the error margin). Here you can see the end results.
It's completely false that AAC 128 kbps delivers "CD quality" and this test also showed that. No lossy format can do this (yet?). And I'm not talking about problematic samples here. Try to do a simple ABX test (you don't need extra expensive hardware, just some decent sound card and headphones).
It's possible to achive transparency with lossy formats on more than 99.9% of the cases (or whatever), but not with 128 kbps.
Cya
This is incorrect in several ways.
First, none of the codecs you mentioned eliminate frequency ranges, inaudible or not. A CD master itself does eliminate some high frequencies, which were deemed inaudible (and which have subsequently been demonstrated through research *not* to be inaudible to a significant minority of people). Compression eliminates some descriptive information about the sound itself, and operates at all frequency levels (though it is designed to affect some more than others).
Second, the codec and the equipment may limit the ability to discern weakness in the file, but most people can discern a difference with relatively inexpensive equipment. In many cases, people must first be shown what to listen for, however. (I teach a class on this. With more than 600 participants over time, I can show about 18 out of every 20 people how to reliably discern a difference in double-blind tests between 192 kbps MP3's and 128 kpbs MP3's. We're not using the world's most expensive equipment, either.
Finally, I and nearly anyone else in the audio or music worlds would take strong issue with your implication that Bose systems are somehow superior to most comparably-priced systems. Bose uses off-the-rack components that are often only one step better than the absolute cheapest components made. That their prices don't reflect this is a victory of marketing, not design. Go to any serious audio discussion on the web and start asking around about Bose. They are an absolute sham.
elo
Distribution rights for a copyrighted work such as a song are generally owned and sold on a per-country basis.
When they first set up the iTMS Apple bought distribution rights for all these songs, but when they did that, they only bought distribution rights in the United States. In other countries, meanwhile, Apple doesn't have rights to anything as a result of those U.S. rights, and the person with the right to sell those distribution rights might not even be the same person.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
VAT? Try: You still can not buy the iPod Mini in Europe.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I call bullshit: one, two, three, four, many more. Perhaps your statistic about Denmark is true (I don't know) but you must have pulled the first figure out of your ass, and your wild speculations have no other ties to reality. Sorry.
I bought a pack of Marlboros in Copacabana, Bolivia (on beautiful Lake Titicaca) back when I was smoking a year ago, and it cost me about 3 bolivianos, which came out to something like $0.40 US at the time. A month later I was in London, and a half pack (10 nails) cost something like 4 pounds sterling, which was about $10 US. It was (almost) enough to make me quit.
I finally quit when I decided it just wasn't cool anymore.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Get them to try it again. The first iTunes on the PC was iffy - it worked OK but was generally unresponsive. The next version is much better. Still takes forever to launch though...
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Yes, but you must realize that most of the iTunes store is U.S. (read English language) music. As iTunes gets more foreign language music online the purchases will probably increase overseas.
Don't confuse download ratios with what is available and what the customer wants.
Ok. Here is the thing. The 128Kbps ACC files on iTMS are not the same as 128Kbps AAC files ripped from a CD let alone crappy 128Kbps MP3. The songs on the iTMS are encoded with a professional quality encoder from the Studio masters. Encoding from a CD would mean you were encoding twice. Once to PCM and again to ACC or MP3.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Are you sure the recent Army cluster announcement and rumors of a mass migration of government systems to macs does not have something to do with?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I think that's a fair price for music...
You think subsidizing the lobbying of ever greater restrictions on your own intellectual freedom is a fair price?
How very... um.... interesting.
Not paying attention, are you? In fact, one of the things the record industry has been bitching about lately is the fact they, too, are now slaves of the large broadcast quasi-monopolies. Payola was outlawed long ago but all that did was cut out the middleman - now instead of paying off a few djs and pds they have to pay megabucks to corporations in the form of "promotional expenses" just to get their tracks placed in rotation.
And that is still one of my favorite movies.
Spice Girls rule!
Erm, a CD *IS* PCM, you don't encode to PCM.
They aren't LOSING money on the PC side, but they ARE losing marketshare and units-shipped ground to other major PC vendors. More and more PCs are being shipped, and a decreasing percentage of them are Macs. This fact is everywhere, and you know it.
And yet the company continues to make major educational sales and grow in other markets like servers.
What? Apple has won a few high-profile edu deals, and that's about it. And Apple is NOT making inroads into the server market, except in a few very small, very niche instances. I'm a director for an enterprise server monitoring product suite, and out of 6000+ customers ranging from Fortune 50 companies to smaller shops, NOT ONE has asked my product management team for OSX support. Not a single one. Stop with the BS generalizations.
And yet many more have started offering support for Apple products.
Really? Care to name a few big software houses who have entered the Mac market with no previous history of Mac support? Because I can sure name a few large software vendors who have dropped Mac title support.
You're wrong. Got proof? Until you do, I'll cite the afterthought nature of Gmail, the incompatibility of Safari with major online banking sites, and general usage quirkiness that I experience with Safari when browsing the web that simply doens't exist when I use IE (or even Firefox .9).
No, the fact that you bring up these rainy day scenarios shows that you are kidding yourself.
It's idiots like you who make me ashamed to be a Mac user. Hint: not everything is sunny in Cupertino with Apple's PC business. Things are holding up for now, but that's due in large part to the wild success of the iPod and ITMS. The G5 shipments aren't what Apple needs them to be, and sales of consumer Macs are sagging. I continue to use a PowerBook because I have all the software I need on OSX for portable purposes, but I also have an Operton 150 Boxx workstation running XP Pro as my desktop. I'm the kind of Mac user you hate: one who understands Apple has a very cool product, but is also aware that platform usage isn't a holy war and that we live in a Windows/x86 world.
Them's the facts. Deal.
Apple's computers uses comodity parts which benefits them and yet they integrate the hardware in such a way that it makes it superior to most PC competition. The G5 is a PRIME example of this. This allows Apple teo get the best advantagesa of commoditized hardware as well as that of non-commoditized hardware.
More complete BS. I just sold my dual G5 2x2 with 20" Cinema Display to a friend in Detroit who runs a production house, so I'm very familiar with the G5 machine. NOTHING about it makes it superior to a similar high-end PC, save, perhaps, its instant wake functionality and awesome OS. On the downside, software and hardware selection is limited, stuff tends to be more expensive, and if you have issues with the machine (mine needed to have the Radeon 9800 Pro card replaced, then, a month later, the power supply), you best hit it off with Applecare, or you're SOL.
You seem to have a habit of making sweeping generalizations with no evidence. If you're going to claim the G5 is a superior machine, then BACK IT UP.
because they feel that there isn't roomo to innovate when yoour rate of return is so insignificant.
Well, tough shit for Apple, because I've got news for them: that's where the market is now. For every guy like me out there who drops $3500+ on a new uber-machine, there's several hundred who won't spend more than $699. And guess who offers that deal? Just about every PC vendor out there. Guess who doesn't? Apple.
Interestingly, most "masters" are at least 24 bit, 96 kHz (and in the future we could see 32 bit, 192 kHz become more common). This must be downsampled to 44.1 kHz and reduced to 16-bit resolution for CD.
While "encoding to PCM" is a misleading choice of words, if going to a lossy format it is much better to encode directly from the higher-resolution master in one step than it is to first reduce to CD resolution and THEN encode to AAC/MP3/OGG/whatever.
This is probably what makes those 128-bit Apple AAC's sound so good.
Sorry: Different definitions of Europe, as north european I don't make comparisons with south or east-europe, as they are much poorer than north-west Europe. Much like you would hardly take mexican figures as representative for the US. The difference is that in Europe the poor south and east european countries makes up a much larger portion of the total population, screwing up the totals.
The figures for PC-penetration range between 92% and 98% depending on survey. And Denmark, Sweden or Finland takes turn at being the country with the highest penetration. Internet has been slightly behind because it used to be very costly to use, unlike in the US, so when measuring modem use, the US is clearly ahead, while they are behind on broadband.
The 25% figure for the US, is only based on upon the UN poverty rate for the US, I don't expect people who can't afford basic life-goods to afford a PC or internet.
But the Studio Master is not.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Scandinavia isn't all there is to Western Europe, you know. Internet penetration and household PC penetration rates in the EU as a whole, even excepting the 10 countries recently joined, even excepting southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Spain), still lag significantly behind the United States, most notably in France, Switzerland, the UK and Germany. Yes, broadband usage is ahead of the US in much of Western Europe, but we weren't talking about broadband. We were talking about plain old Internet access.
I wish I knew where you came up with that statistic about 25% of United States citizens living below the poverty line, according to the UN. Last I heard, the UNDP had set the poverty line at those living on less than US$2/day by purchasing power parity; I'd be surprised to learn that a quarter of Americans live on less than $2 a day.
I hardly know what to make of your desire not to include southern countries in your definition of Europe because they "screw up the totals." I mean, I wish we in the US could do the same for Texas, honestly, but I'm not going to pretend it's not part of the US.
Hmm. They used to do at least a full LP side at a time on classic rock stations locally. This was a late-night tradition for a while in Minneapolis. The promotion was based on its being non-stop, but I guess it wasn't the whole thing; they'd pause in between the sides to talk and throw a few Clearasil ads.
(We don't really need laws to prevent stations from playing music without commercials. The stations don't make any money that way.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You buy a CD. The artist ges almost nothing from it, the store only slightly more. The rest of it goes to the record company, who in turn helps fund the RIAA. The RIAA then, in turn, spends Millions of dollars in washington making sure crackpots like Hollings invent nonsensical bullshit like the NET act (and this most recent pinnacle of buffonery, that "enable" act.)
These laws not only cost us our freedoms, in the end they cost us both jobs and the ability to compete in the international marketplace. This is not YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK but rather YOUR CD PURCHASES AT WORK. That "it doesn't bother me cuz I don't do it" attitude is, and always has been, "idiocy in the defense of freedom."
What are you supposed to do? Well, you could try realizing the international scene is not "Universally owned" and there's a LOT of good stuff out there not on US labels, not on US airwaves, and not subsidizing anticompetetive legislation in your own country. It's not just music you are buying - it's culture. What culture would you rather subsidize? One that embraces artists AND the audience, or one that treats the audience as so many criminals?
And again I'll point out that BB King and JL Hooker and EC are far from the only blues musicians in this country. And it's interesting you mention this because I live right smack in the middle of Mississippi; I am less than an hour from Clarksville - you need not tell me about the origin of the blues.
In fact, BB King has played the High School Gymnasium in the town not six miles from my home - a rather impoverished small town of about 1000 people. What's he doing here? As always, Google has the answer.
There is a giant Blues festival here every single year. No, wait - that's a lie. There are lots of blues festivals here every year. When they were still with us both Lightnin' Hopkins and Gatemouth Brown used to play "clubs" (plywood paneled barbeque shacks) around here. You want to learn the blues? This is how you learn. Trying to learn the blues from studio records is like trying to learn handwriting from those second grade books: it's all hyper-perfect, computer generated sterile crap that can never be achieved in real life (nor should be). And "the vast majority" of their music was not, and has never been released on ANY label. If you want to hear Mississippi Blues, you gotta get outta the house and hear it cut live through the luminipherous ether.
And by the way: ever heard of Jimmie Rodgers? Robert Johnson? Johnson died penniless and his only recorded works were basically stolen from him during his own lifetime. He's regarded as the king of the blues and his records are, strictly speaking, public domain. Jimmie Rodgers (a white boy who yodeled) was also considered (and still is) one of the early blues pioneers as well. And again, his recordings are pretty much "free" at this point, at least literally if not legally. I dare say, neither of these gents are going to miss the money if you should prefer FLACs over CDs. And their works was not released on RIAA labels, since the RIAA did not even exist then. The recordings have simply been purchased, long after their respective deaths, by these corporations.
And arguing "I have no choice" is utterly stupid. Besides easily being proven patently untrue, this statements reeks of those other "enablers" - not pirates, but alcoholics and drug users. "I just need a little to get my head straight and then you come in here and wreck it and I have to buy more - see what you made me do?"
There are LOTS of choices... and lots of alternatives from which to choose them. So long as you give these parasites your money, you are supporting them - no two ways about it. You can hate them all you like, you can cuss and spit on every cent you hand over... but in the end, you're supporting them with every penny.
And: Those blues recordings are ALEADY FREE. The music of Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers - much of the stuff recorded even by BB King is now PD because the recordings were unclaimed back in the 70's when the first laws on this matter were passed - just like those old John Wayne movies that sell at wallyworld for three-ninety-five.
And we're talking about the web. Whose laws apply? Every "point" you make is an insipid defense to excuse your inaction on the matter. If AofMP3.com offers recordings for a dime each and it's legal, how does it suddenly become illegal because it's in your house? How can you even attempt a logical justification for donating twenty bucks to the people lobbying away everyone's rights (including the rights of these artists you seem to treasure)? If BB King says "come to greenwood with your tape deck" how the hell can you say the recording is illegal? How does the guy who wrote and performed the song on stage not get the right to give away his art? The man hasn't sweated a record label in decades - he tours (he'll play your birthday party for just a few grand) and he has his club - so he hasn't earned the right to share his art as he chooses?