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iTMS Sells 100,000,000th Song
Macslacker writes "At 10:26 PM PDT on Sunday, July 11, Apple apparently sold its 100 millionth song at the iTunes Music Store. While the contest may now be over, congrats to Apple for a job well done."
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Good luck waiting for that track you want to appear at the quality you want from P2P.
Maybe someday you'll have a job and responsibilities and realize that time and convenience are worth something.
Just to pick one nit.
By definition, something that you've sold 100,000,000 of is not "too expensive". It might be too expensive for YOU (as indeed it's too expensive for me), it's obviously found a market and services that market satisfactorily.
Re: your other points, Apple couldn't very well change all the musicians' contracts with a wave of their hand. Now that they're players in the market, we'll see what happens.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Actually, I can see exactly where Jobs is coming from WRT portable video.
With music, you are more likely to "play" it in a variety of contexts that are already well-established. I used my iPod a great deal this past week, both on a family vacation to Niagara Falls (about 10 hours each way) and on several short trips. The passengers in the back might have been interested in watching video, but those of us in the driver's seat aren't (or shouldn't be). For the backseat crowd, there are already solutions for playing DVDs that way.
WRT downloading movies, there's a different issue. Of all the movies that I really love, only a handful have been worth re-watching enough for me to buy the DVD. (This excludes my purchases of movies for the kids when they were younger, and would watch "The Lion King" or "Alladin" several times each week.) If push came to shove, and I had to rebuild my video collection from scratch, I'd probably only repurchase 5-10 movies. The rest are just not that important to me.
Now... why would I bother downloading/storing that number of videos to an iPod-like device? There are other products in the portable DVD space that accomplish the same basic functionality, and the times that I would actually watch a movie away from my home system (vacation or a REALLY long trip where I'm the passenger) are few and far between. Again, that need is quite nicely satisfied by a portable DVD & screen.
Demographically, I'm pretty much Joe-average (in consumer terms), so I think Jobs has hit the mark when he thinks that iPod video is a non-issue.
Tim
It boils down even simpler for me. I'm a CONSUMER. I like, sometimes, to buy stuff that I want. I'm surfing the net and an old Genesis song comes on the Classic Rock station, and I think, "Hey, I love that song! I wish I had it." I CAN have it. Here are my choices: 1. Go to the store and buy the whole album. Too time consuming and pricey. 2. Go to the used CD place and buy the album used. IF they have it. Time consuming, costs maybe 5 or 6 bucks. Quality unknown until I play it the whole way through. 3. Buy it new or used online. Then I pay 5 to 15 bucks, and I have to WAIT for it to be delivered. This is an impulse buy situation, so that won't work. 4. Download it illegally. That's assuming I can FIND it. This is Genesis we're talking about, not Maroon 5. And if I do find it, odds are it's gonna be a 128 kbps mp3 file, and that file format is NOT high enough quality for me. It may be fine for the kiddies who listen to music over their $49 Dell plastic speakers, but I've got an actual real stereo. 5. Download it legally from an online music service for a buck. The easiest to use service being Apple's. I don't give a RAT'S ASS about big business, fair to artists, whatever. I just want the song. And #5 is the most logical solution here. I think people who are stealing music online because they want to "fight the power" should examine everything ELSE they purchase. Like their sneakers. Some poor 6 year old in China or Korea went home last night with bloody fingers so you could have those $90 sneakers. (cue violins.) Seriously, people shouldn't get all high and mighty about one issue and then conveniently ignore analyzing every other product they buy that might exploit someone. The whole argument is just to justify stealing music online. If you're going to steal music, be honest about it at least.
Music - www.richardmac.com
MPEG2 sucks, MPEG4 can achieve the same quality with fewer artifacts in about 1/4th the bandwidth.
This is not true. MPEG4 can compress better yes. but if you have ever successfully ripped a 2 GB DVD to 1/4 it's size (500 MB) without a loss in video or sound quality, I will send you a nice shiny penny, since it is not currently possible.
You can achieve near-perfect video quality at 1 GB if you settle for stereo sound.... but if you want Dolby Digital and perfect video both, even with MPEG4 you are still looking at at least 1.3 GB or more. This is speaking from lots of experience with many MPEG4 codecs.
These complaints all fail for obvious, factual reasons.
"It's too expensive"
Well, I don't have a PhD in Economics, but I'm pretty sure that when you're selling your product in a non-monopoly situation, and your sales are huge, that's a good indicator that your prices are not too expensive. If it's too expensive for you, then Apple simply has to decide if they can live without you as a customer. I think they've made that decision, and it's worked out pretty well for them.
"First of all, Apple gets 3 times as much money as musicians from each sale. Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do. Record labels receive the other 65% of each sale."
In other news, gravity still pulls things down. There isn't another way to do it; this is how the world works right now. If Apple wants to sell the latest Britney Spears song, they can't just call Britney and say "Hey Brit, how does 20 cents per song sound? Does that work for you?" She doesn't have the power to sell them her songs; she gave that right away when she signed her record contract. If you think that's evil, then your beef is with the record companies, not Apple. Apple buys from the labels because they're the ones holding the songs. If they could pay artists 40 cents per song instead of paying the labels 65, they'd do so in a heartbeat. As for the "35 cents is a ripoff", ITMS is not a large profit source for Apple: that 35 cents barely exceeds their costs (servers, bandwidth, processing media, design, management overhead, etc...). They've said that the major thrust of ITMS is to sell iPods, not to generate vast profits from song sales.
"But when Apple supports and profits from an obviously unfair system, while telling customers that it's 'fair to the artists', they are just as guilty."
Bullshit. And you're going to tell me that by using your computer to access the Internet and post on slashdot, you're supporting the agenda of the sweatshop owners who built your PC components, all of the communications companies who own circuits between you and the servers you visit, and the admins who run slashdot? Sorry, but I don't accept that philosophy. It's a big, complicated world, and everyone has to live in it. Apple looked at the world as it was, saw a way to make it a little bit better, and seems to have done a good job. You presume to blame them for the sorry state that existed before they got there, saying that they should have fixed everything or done nothing. Let me know how that works out for you.
And we do hear these complaints on slashdot, all the time. This isn't a haven for Apple fanboys, it's a haven for Linux fanboys. These complaints are neither original, nor well reasoned.
I don't understand the question. I can't get through an article about Apple without a bunch of people who like whatever it is they've done today, and a bunch of people who would eat their grandmothers before using it.
You mean you actually pay attention to the blurbs? Wow.
Apple used to be a synonym for "shitty" around here. Your UID is low enough, you should remember. They've changed peoples' opinions by consistently releasing superior products.
Don't like 'em? Don't buy 'em.
I guess anybody who likes Apple products and thinks that, by and large, they do a good job must be in the reality distortion field.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!