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How iPods Took Over the World
An anonymous reader writes "The Observer has a piece today about the iPod's ascension to dominance of the mp3 player market. The author argues that it's largely the result of clever business tactics and the iTunes music store." From the article: "The second thing about the iPod: it puts you, not them, in control. Basically, the record labels are devotees of the Henry Ford business model: 'You can have any music you want so long as it's what I want to give you.' But using the cyberspace jukebox, you're no longer at their mercy. You don't have to pay for the four filler tracks on every album. You don't have to buy albums at all. You can put country next to classical, punk next to jazz, Barry Manilow next to Placido Domingo (wait, that's a joke)."
... nobody in their right mind would listen to Placido Domingo.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Because, of course, you can only put songs from the iTunes Music Store on an iPod, right? Even though the iPod was released before the iTMS... iTunes defaults to ripping tracks as un-DRMed AACs which you can play anywhere you can play an AAC. Or you can rip to MP3 or WAV or AIFF. And you can import all those into iTunes without any DRM going on them either. If you don't want to buy from the iTunes Music Store, guess what? You don't have to!
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
You are talking about the iTunes Music Store, not the iPod. My iPod Music is all MP3s. If I want to, I can just copy them to every other player. I won't, since I happen to like my iPod (and, accordingly, do not have another player).
I do not even care that there's this store, where admittedly you can buy music that's not easily reproducible. The store has nothing to do with the iPod; it was made after I bought my iPod, and hasn't influenced my decision to buy one (I think the US store had already been established at that time, though).
The iPod was already taking over the market before iTMS came along. It certainly helped them ramp up sales over the last few years, but the real reason the iPod became so popular was because of the one thing that Apple is known for getting right most of the time: Interface simplicity.
Remember what most MP3 players looked like before the iPod? I'm not just talking about the general ugliness of some of them, but the way the interface was designed specifically to appeal to people who LOVE high-tech gagetry, and think the Windows file manager is downright spiffy.
No non-geek had any clue at all how to operate them, or even what they were for. They just barely knew that "EM PEE THREE" had something to do with music, because their nephew set them up with Napster back around 1999 so they could steal music online and listen to it at the office.
Then the iPod comes out. It's not an "MP3 Player", it's a music player. It has simple and obvious controls. It's easy to figure out how to get songs into it, and easy to figure out how to play them when they are there.
What iTMS is doing is ensuring that the iPod *keeps* it's lead in the market. It's also creating a new revenue source for Apple. (They started it off as a possible loss-leader to sell iPods, but it's turning a profit these days, and with the addition of video downloads, I'm betting it will become an even bigger revenue generator for them. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay two bucks for a low-res TV show episode, but it appears that some people are happy to do so. Go figure.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It's the most user-friendly mp3 player with the best interface, and excellent software syncing. Oh to all you non-conformists herescreaming that it was "T3H MARKETING!!!", Apple used to use exactly the same kinds of adverts for the macintosh, that doesn't exactly have a huge market share.
I'm starting to feel like the only person on earth who doesn't like Ipods. I admit they are well designed, they have a great user interface. They're very functional. From my point of view there's just one thing wrong with them. The built-in rechargable power supply. I use my MP3 player in a lot of outdoor activities. I prefer a device that I can either replace the battery or take one or more spares with me. You can't do that with an Ipod. Instead, I have a small Sandisk MP3 player which takes on AAA battery. When travelling I can get replacement batteries anywhere. When hiking or biking I can take a spare rechargable AAA. When camping, I can bring several. The design and UI are nowhere near as nice, but that's trumped (at least for me) by the portability.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I love my iPod. Especially because of the sheer volume of sound files it holds, and the way its integration with iTunes* allows me to manage my songs simply. But I've been arranging songs for my personal use (without buying the entire album) for more than 15 years.
*The application, not the store. I don't like using the iTunes store, because the interface is horrible for browsing. I only use it for podcasts and the occasional audiobook.
"You don't have to pay for the four filler tracks on every album."
Wow, I just had a great idea. Record companies could have sold a smaller record with just one song on it and sold it for less money. Wait. Since there are two sides of a record, they could put another song on the other side. They could have called these records something like a SINGLE. They could have had some of the advantages of the iPod years ago.
You just don't get it, Apple has succeeded because they have what those enterprise software salesdroids call a "solution."
;)
The iPod was popular on it's own at first because it was _simple_ and easy to use, their initial apps for it IMHO sucked miserably. But the iPod integrated with your already existing music library, and syncing everything up was very, very easy.
Now add a couple years, you can choose from a couple different models, all using the same easy to use interface, it still interfaces nicely with iTunes, which runs on Mac/Windows which can rip and organize all your CDs, and sync with your iPod, and hot dog! Now you can buy music straight from withini the same application that you already keep all your music in to begin with!
Don't fool yourself, marketing was a vital role, but don't underscore the brillant move by apple to bring all these music services into iTunes+iPod, because without the whole package you just have something that's smaller than the Nomad Jukebox, lame.
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I'd recommend amaroK if you use KDE, or Rhythmbox or gnupod if you use gnome. Banshee also handles ipods pretty well.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
but I wish articles would stop making articles about ipods then spending most of the time talking about itunes.
There's something to be said of albums that are meant to be taken as one whole work of art. There aren't any really horrible songs or filler, and each song just kinda flows or leads into the next. Some of my favorite examples:
- Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon
- Nirvana's Nevermind
- Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here
- Soundgarden's Superunknown
- Michael Jackson's Thriller (despite that horrible duet with Paul McCartney)
Whenever I hear a song from one of these albums on the radio, I'm always waiting for the following track to start playing at the end. It's so unsettling to hear them out of context. It's like seeing a drawing of Spider-Man floating on a page with no background, rather than in a comic book with a plot and setting. I'm sure every classic rock fan has encountered that one jackass DJ who plays Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" and not "Livin' Lovin' Maid" afterwards.
I don't think the situation will get better for we who enjoy music's artistic merits. Radio and MTV (or MuchMusic) already can't tolerate any songs longer than about 4 minutes. I feel this "iPod effect" will only cause record labels to enourage their artists to record music that is marketable rather than good (more so than they do already).
I dunno, maybe I'm in the minority, but I've actually NEVER heard anyone say "I bought my iPod so I can finally buy music from iTunes!!"
People buy the iPod because it's attractive, has a large harddrive (one of the first players to use a harddrive, I think), and has a great interface (circular touchpad) for browsing the contents. And, no doubt, because the marketing has been successful in making it the first thing that comes to mind when people think about MP3 players. Frankly, there may be other players on the market that do as good a job or better, but when it comes down to it the iPod is just a good little piece of hardware that does what it does very well. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why it's popular.
Personally I haven't bought one because I want something that can record a line-in signal. And because I have, like, no money at all right now. I might eventually get an iRiver or something that can record CD-quality music.
However, I'm almost sure that iTunes is never the reason why people by the iPod..
Of course, I could be wrong.
C'mon . . . lots of folks have an iPod and have never purchased a single song from the iTunes store. The reason iPod was so successful was that it was the first portable music player with mainstream appeal which let folks play non-DRM'd music on it. If we would have been forced to re-encode our stuff (a la Sony) people would have never touched it, and Apple knew this. (Sony probably knew that too, but their label / content arm wouldn't stand for DRM-free players) The other part of mainstream appeal is the iTunes software -- highly intuitive for non-geeks, extremely fast, no forced advertising / spyware, etc. It just works the way it's supposed to.
The iPod is a great deal. The iTunes Music Store is a terrible deal. The original poster doesn't seem to get that at all, nor do most of the press.
sulli
RTFJ.
It may have given "you" the perception you're in control, but you're not, you have been betrayed by every corner of the commercial industry. The only unique factor about Apple and the iPod is they've made the betrayal seem warm and fuzzy.
You are confusing the iTunes Music Store with the iPod.
I have purchased 6 iPods and currently use 2 (sold the others). I haven't purchased a single track from the iTunes music store yet my iPods are full of music I have legally purchased.
I am fully in control of that music, as mentioned in the article. The iPod works perfectly with plain 'ole mp3 files.
A clarification: iTunes will only rip to DRM-free formats. It will play some DRM'd formats (m4p, audible), but it will not create them. This is unlike WMP, which will take an un-DRM'd source format (CDDA) and add DRM to it when you rip it (although I believe this 'feature' can be turned off).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, what does the Apple player do that my Lyra or iRiver MP3 players do not... other than come bundled with a nifty iTunes store that is pretty much the same thing I get from MusicMatch JukeBox?
Granted, I do get to spend twice as much money for an iPod that I do for my Lyra, but that's hardly reason to buy one.
The iPod is a lot like a Gucci purse. Any old K-Mart purse will carry stuff just as well, but it is not nearly as trendy.
(not that I carry a purse, but you get the idea)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I'm not quite sure why this is flamebait. The iPod has surpassed other MP3 players largely because Apple has been able to position it well, turning it into a status symbol.
It is a quality product, but look at Bose speakers. Marketing goes a long way.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
"What does the Apple player do that my Lyra or iRiver MP3 players do not"
Have a decent user interface. That may not be important to you, but it is important to a couple of people. Those people bought iPods.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yep 14,822 songs on my computer organized by itunes and playable on my ipod, not one of which was purchased from the itunes music store, not one of which has a trace of DRM. Would we all use ogg in an ideal world? Perhaps, but this will do because in practice I can have ALL my music without DRM anyway way I want to "acquire" it, and including in the apple's lossless compression format which sounds EXACTLY the same as a cd. In theory it sucks, in practice not too bad. That's why I've drunk the Apple cool-aid even as a lefty crunchy co-opy kind of guy who supports OSS in theory. Much as I'd like a perfect free software world I dread the thought of configuring ALSA or what ever the latest flaky GNU/OSS OS audio subsystem is at the moment. Hint sound has NEVER worked properly for me installing Ubuntu on two different p.c.s. Linux/BSD is a GREAT server and as a home entertainment OS? Not so much...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Simplicity, hype, marketing.
There are far better mp3 players out there, but they are harder to use, or their knobs are too small, or they have too many functions, or they are not well advertised...
What you gotta understand, and since we're kinda "geeks" here, I guess you already do, is that iPod is far from the best mp3 player out there, let alone with best value/price ratio (mentioning value/price ratio and Apple in one sentence makes me laugh).
Case in point, my shitty mp3 player:
$880 mp3/wma player with FM radio. It's smaller than iPod shuffle, but has a screen with song selections, doubles as a mass storate USB stick (1GB), it has rubber grip & it doesn't scratch at all, even if I put it in my pocket with my keys. Oh and it uses one AAA battery, so you never have to charge it, since you charge the other batteries while you're out listening to the player (and they are so tiny, you can carry 2-3 as a backup in your pocket for more than 16h total play time).
The brand? Canyon or something. Popularity: none. The manual is written in poorly written English, never seen ads or posters for it.
But iPod sucks compared to this thing.
> Those people bought iPods.
I'm not so sure that those people even gave other products a passing glance, much less enough to make an informed choice. Their only concern during purchase is the color.
To say that everything out there pales in comparison to the iPod isn't very fair. The iPod has some usability shortcomings just as other players. I've owned the great 5GB Rio Carbon, and got a color iPod solely for the space. And I do miss the ability to bookmark a 5 hour mp3, start to play music in shuffle mode, then switch back to the bookmark, all without taking my Rio out of my pocket.
What's with the iPod only bookmarking "podcasts" and audiobooks, and not any old mp3 file?
What's with the iPod only having one shuffle option, and no option to shuffle based on genre, artist, etc?
So I don't think other players are getting their fair share of attention or respect. Maybe it's too much work to compare the available units to make a truly independant decision.
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
Amarok needs a hell of a lot of work. The only thing I managed to get it to do was freeze. When I tried to add the ~1000 songs I have on my computer, it quickly ate up all my memory and then stopped doing much of anything, slowing the rest of the system down to the point that I had to do a hard reboot.
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are a number of ways around this. You're right, it's annoying for the average user, but not so annoying that it offsets all the benefits of iPod + iTunes.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
I must be misunderstanding you... it is possible and very easy to sort by Artist or Album. What do you mean?
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Even so, every other player on the market lacks something compared to the iPod, be it style, features, capacity, ease of use, etc. The iPod is quite well rounded. By the way, it's "du jour."
* Rip with Konqueror's audiocd: function. With too lame, ogg is a concern only for those who care about freedom and saving 10-20% of storage space. Correct lables, flac, ogg and mp3 encoding has never been easier. ABCDE provides more robust ripping from the command line if you want that.
* Record analog with Krec, Krecord, Audacity or Gramofile. Use Rockbox for your iPod or iRiver portable device.
* Get your new music off the web. The Internet Archive [archive.org] has more than 30,000 concerts by artists that want you to share. Most players have built in stream sources.
* Play and organize your music with Amarok. It's all the goodness of iTunes with none of the annoyances.
Yeah, or they could use one program to do all of that and not waste time mucking about with the command line, updating dependencies (depending on what distro you're using) and generally jumping through a number of annoying hoops just to perform one simple task. This is one of the main reasons that Linux as a whole has very little share of the desktop market - lack of integration. Everything in Linux relies on something else, and while that's more efficient for servers, it's just a huge pain in the ass for home users.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
No, the main obstacle is that all of the free software you've listed is about a billion times less convenient than iTunes or even Windows Media Player, especially to anyone without extensive knowledge of computers.
If you want to bookmark mp3s, go into iTunes, select one or more tracks, get info, go to options tab and check the 'Remember playback position' box. You can now bookmark the track(s).
Hope that helps.
Of course, that's assuming some other mechanism isn't in the pipeline to circumvent that.
;-)
Yeah.. Sony is negotiating with Roxio to automatically add a RootKit to all audio CDs burned with Toast
Georg
The iPod's marketing is so clever, they've managed to bamboozle the author of the article evidenced by sentence one, paragraph four:
Then why the fuck are you ranting about the iTunes Music Store?
Of course, that's assuming some other mechanism isn't in the pipeline to circumvent [burning to CD and ripping].
This is a virtual impossibility. They cannot enforce a system where you can't rip a standard CD without extreme effort, such as making a law that even *this* Congress won't pass.
And if it ever *did* happen, you'd still have be able to do it with your existing hardware and software long before it became impossible, which brings us to:
Oh, and the music you're writing to a CD to rip back to mp3s?
it started out inferior in quality... with compression.
Inferior to what? I knew when I bought it what format it was in. It's inferior to CD, superior to tape. If I really need a song in full CD quality, I won't buy a tape, or from iTunes, I'll buy a CD. As of yet, I haven't had a need to.
it will lose quality as it gets passed up the chain and back down -- you will have to make some "quality" decisions about what level mp3 you need to retain even the quality left in the track.
Or rip to lossless if you *really* care about the minimal amount of quality loss you'd get in most cases with AAC or MP3.
Oh yeah, you're going to have to re-enter the track, album, and artist info, that gets lost in the process.
No, it doesn't. When your burn a CD, iTunes remembers the track info for that CD, even if it's a mixed CD.
The burn-rip scenario you bring up is an emergency escape protocol to engage in *only* if for some reason you need to escape from iTunes DRM. Presumably, you're comfortable with the current terms if you've already bought more than a couple of songs, so this really only comes into play if Apple alters the terms of FairPlay in an unacceptable way, or you've decided to go into full-(hippie||libertarian)-mode with Linux or BSD.
In other words, *WORST CASE*, you have to burn and re-rip and decide whether to go lossless or take some most likely imperceptible quality loss, so no matter how much fear-mongering your wish to inject into the discussion, Apple has placed a bottom-limit on the "evil" you can attribute to their DRM. As an iTunes Music Store customer, I fully understand the possibility, but not the probability, what I may have to go through to 'liberate' my music, but as it stands, my music is freely usable enough as it is.
one of the most egregious betrayals by the music industry is the CDDB
Which has *what* to do with Apple? In fact, Apple corrects this so-called "betrayal" by using the CDDB to put your track names into your ripped music since the record labels have only exceptionally rarely put them on their CDs (which Apple does not create or sell, and thus has no responsibility for). Apple has gone even further, and done what the music industry has failed to do with CDs, and put the track information into the music that they actually *do* sell on the iTunes Music Store.
The music industry is pretty bad, and Apple has had to make some compromises in order to play with them (as we all must do when we deal with them, generally via buying CDs or listening to the radio), but Apple has actually done the commendable thing and given us a truly fair deal--a deal that has, built in, an emergency escape option. Do you expect the music industry would have done that on their own? Apple's not perfect, but all-in-all, they're pretty damn good.
I'm holding out hope I can continue to find unadulterated CDs, unencumbered (and high quality) mp3s and players that will play them all interchangeably and headache free.
Unadulterated CDs work just fine with iPods and iTunes. In fact, even adulterated ones (which have nothing whatsoever to do with Apple, iTunes (player or store) or the iPod) work just fine in iTunes on the Mac.
I'm suprised this was marked as a troll.
Because his post is that of an anti-DRM troll. DRM is only tangentially relevant to the topic at hand, yet he used it as an excuse to go on an ideological rant.
No one *wants* DRM, but most everyone will accept it under reasonable terms. Apple's terms are more than reasonable. Posting such an unreasonable rant about reasonable DRM is not insightful--at least, yagu's rant isn't. His post is inflammatory, and really qualifies as a troll or flamebait, even though I'm sure he truly believes in what he posted.
Guess the apple fans don't like insightful opinions.
What was insightful about his post? Nothing in it was relevant to the topic of the iPod. Most of it was ideological vitriol. And the only reasonable part, which you point out below, was aimed at a company that did the *exact opposite* of the "CDDB betrayal" he complains about!
How is that not a troll, or at the very least flamebait?
Insightful? Are you mad?
The point about the CDDB database is relevent. It seems that all to often companies don't really understand what the consumer wants. Often times, the quality of community created software is vastly superior to anything a company would come out with due to their marketing restrictions.
Yes, all too often companies *don't* listen to their customers. The whole point of this slashdot story is that Apple does, and created a product that gives the customer what they really and truly want in the iPod.
I think you're confusing "full-featured" with "better".
Sure, the iPod is not as full-featured as some other players, but I think the fact that they're harder to use automatically removes them from the "better" category. Ease of use is a feature, too, even for geeks like us.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Of course, that's assuming some other mechanism isn't in the pipeline to circumvent that.
Poster 1: "They're probably plotting something! Maybe! You never know!"
Posters 2 through 10: "Wow, how insightful!"
Last time I checked WMP has the DRM ripping turned off by default (of course, last time I checked was around a year ago).
David Pogue said it best in a NYTimes article (free, no reg required for Pogue's articles) about a(nother, ho hum) Samsung MP3 player.
He points out that Apple didn't get just one thing right, they got a bunch of things right AND made them work well together.
== Quote:
The iPod's competitors have wasted years of opportunity by assuming that they can beat the iPod on features and price alone. They're wrong.
In fact, at least six factors make the iPod such a hit:
cool-looking hardware;
a fun-to-use, variable-speed scroll wheel;
an ultrasimple software menu;
effortless song synchronization with Mac or Windows;
seamless, rock-solid integration with an online music store (iTunes);
and a universe of accessories.
Mess up any aspect of the formula, and your iPod killer is doomed to market-share crumbs.
== Endquote.
I'd argue that they also got the ITMS business model right, in addition to the superb integration of the above six.
You'll note there's no mention of marketing anywhere there.