2004 Digital Media Winners and Losers

An anonymous reader writes "MP3 Newswire has just released Richard Menta's annual digital media winners and losers list. Apple tops the winners list for the second year in a row as does eDonkey and last spring's Grey Album protest. Losers include the term iPod Killers, Winamp, and the WMA format. BitTorrent made both lists. Menta also released a 2005 wishlist. Topping that list is an iPod in-dash unit similar to the old Rio Car. You can see Menta's previous years winners and losers lists."

Comments

mnb Re:Thanks to EMI...

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Lame 3.90.3 and the --alt-preset standard command line switch will give you much better results than a fixed bitrate encode at 256kbs. The file will also be about 25% smaller.

If file size doesn't matter to you, use --alt-preset extreme. The file size will be about the same, and you can sleep happy knowing that you used more bits.

Re:sold out website

[JeffTL]

I think what he was saying is that as good as any of those devices might be, none of them sell like the iPod.

To outdo the iPod you need to outdo the concept -- not just make what amounts to an iPod with way-too-small video playback and no iTMS compatibility. There are basically three companies that I believe could not only outdo the iPod in quality but then move the merchandise: Sony (if they get their act together), Microsoft (with their massive R&D potential), and Apple itself (Where do you think the iPod profits and the interest from that $4bn bank account are going? Most likely into research, the lifeblood of any company that depends largely on innovation).

It's my personal theory that the halo effect was just what Apple had in mind when they went full-bore with iPod and iTunes for Windows -- what may be the world's first self-sustaining itself-profitable ad campaign, with the intention of getting an iMac onto every desk and a PowerBook into every briefcase, with far higher margins than the iPod and a greater potential for sale of software.

This is particularly true for the iTunes Music Store, which is run at break-even -- its purpose is to provide iPod filler and introduce people slowly to Apple software. Why do you think the Windows version looks a lot like something out of OS X, when they could have easily made it look more like a regular Windows app? So when people go to the Apple store to get an iPod accessory, they stop to look at the G5 -- who could resist? -- and everything looks "just like iTunes" and they take one home. So it's not just a self-sustaining profitable ad campaign, but a multitiered one -- iTMS draws people to the iPod or vice versa, the iPod draws them into the Apple store or to the rear right corner of CompUSA, and then they buy a Mac.

That's why all the other online music stores are failing -- Napster isn't a hardware company, but they have to compete with Apple, which is running a superior product at just over even for the purposes of selling more hardware. So if anything is more "loser" than a theoretical iPod killer, it's an iTunes killer -- the Music Store business model isn't designed to be necessarily profitable (at least not to the extent of being a company's main business), but rather to transfer a low cost to the consumer to increase the likelihood of purchasing hardware.

Nope, reporting the news as accurate as the market

[2nd Post!]

The market has branded the iPod a winner, and this site just reports it. It's not spinning anything (as you would believe).

6 million iPods sold, possibly 8.

You also have some strange history there. Apple didn't create the first mp3 player. Or the second, third, or even 10th. Creative and Compaq were ahead of them with hard drive units and Rio, Samsung, and a few others were ahead of them with CD and flash based units.

Apple is #1 for transforming the mp3 market from niche to mainstream. That is why the iPod is synonymous with mp3 players; not because it's the first, but because it made the market it now rules.

Kind of like how Ford created the automobile market, even though they weren't by far the first cars.

What you want is not a list of "2004 winners," and "2004 losers," you want a list of "2004 cool gadgets," but then I would argue what is important:

The device that no one remembers?
The device that everyone knows?

5. Closed Torrent Sites

[Neduz]

Bittorrent is on the winners list, but several key torrent sites that were raided are on the losers list as they have been permanently closed. The maddening thing is that torrent sites don't trade music files, just torrents (little road signs to files) so there is no legal precedent in ANY country that makes them illegal. The problem is, these sites don't have the money to mount a case. The concept of guilty until proven innocent gets a boost here.

That is not true actually, a few years ago, in Belgium, when mp3's where publicly available on http and ftp servers, some webmasters that only linked to those files or sites were sentenced/convicted in court (I don't know which is the most correct legal term). Here is a Dutch text that describes what happened: http://www.law.kuleuven.ac.be/jura/36n2/dumortier. htm .