Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard

stivi writes "BusinessWeek has up an article about a war: a standards war in the online music business. Apple's recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher's catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod's AAC format as the industry standard. The article talks about possible reasons why AAC might marginalize WMA, as well as deals with some of the implications of drm-free aac-standardized industry. 'Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become iPod compatible, and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.'"

Comments

MP3

[hokiejimbo]

What exactly makes this different than .mp3? Other online music stores have had the option to sell unrestricted .mp3 files for plenty of time and still haven't decided to do that. Yes, AAC is arguably better than MP3, but both are quite "iPod compatible".

Re:MP3

[jmorris42]

> There are no online stores that have been able to sell DRM-free MP3's, at least not if they are
> selling music from the larger labels.

Which is exactly the only thing new here, but some asshat wanted to spin it pro Apple. If EMI is willing to A) give up DRM and B) allow non-Apple retailers in the deal why would they mandate AAC? No, when Yahoo, Walmart, etc enter the DRM Free game they will be selling whatever format(s) customers demand since they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market.

Of course if EMI and the other labels only allow Apple to sell without DRM then yea, Apple wins.

Re:MP3

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

In addition, if one reads EMI's announcement about them selling DRM-free music, it's clear that it's neither AAC nor iTunes exclusive. Other music stores will be selling EMI's songs in mp3 format soon, and nothing will have changed with respect to the popularity of mp3 vs AAC.

I disagree. This is likely to change the relative popularity of MP3 and AAC. There are several reasons for this. First, the iTunes store is currently the most popular of the online music services and likely will be the first one taking advantage of this offer. As a result, a lot of MP3 manufacturers are going to be looking to add AAC support to their player to capitalize upon Apple's work and to make transition easy for existing iPod users. This will expand the potential market for AAC files from iPods and Zune, to almost all portable players. With that change, a lot more music services will consider using the AAC format either instead of or in addition to MP3.

Second, right now almost all commercial services require DRM. That means such a service must choose to either use WMA, RealMedia, or roll their own solution. Support for Real is nonexistent among hardware vendors, so they target WMA as the easiest solution. Very few commercial services offer MP3. So how does this event change things? All those WMA offerings are now going to be looking for format for non-DRM'd files that targets the iPod. That rules out WMA. So they are probably going to be choosing AAC or MP3 or both. MP3 is probably a little cheaper for licensing and has wider support, but AAC allows for smaller files for the same level of audio quality, saving bandwidth costs and speeding up downloads. Further, record companies will have already converted masters to sampled AAC for Apple, possibly making that a preference from them.

I don't see that MP3 or AAC will immediately dominate for DRM free music sales, but I bet Apple is not the only major store selling AAC downloads by then end of 2008.

Re:MP3

[e4g4]

they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market. How does mandating an open format help apple lockup the hardware market? It's a more or less trivial process for DAP manufactures to add AAC decoding capability, and substantially cheaper than including WMA decoders, I would imagine. Not that a record company would necessarily mandate format, I'm just saying that any mandate of a AAC format would only benefit Apple in the very short term, as other manufacturers catch up.

Re:MP3

[nutshell42]

AAC is MP4.

That's very misleading. mp3 is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, AAC is part of the MPEG-4 specification, .mp4 refers to the container format of the MPEG-4 specification that's based on .mov and can contain a large number of different video, audio and other streams in a number of different codecs.

So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.

This is also misleading, although AAC *is* better. With codecs like these, the only thing that is fixed is the actual bitstream, leaving a lot of leeway to the different encoders. An mp3 encoded with an excellent encoder will be superior to an AAC by a mediocre encoder (e.g. I don't know about Quicktime's aac encodes but its AVC is complete and utter shit, even though AVC is an excellent spec). Also cpu-time constraints can have a serious impact on encoding quality, although that's normally not an issue if you do the encoding on a PC.

One big advantage of AAC are advanced features like 5.1 channels and such. There are hacks to tack on lots of features to mp3 but it lacks the (relatively) clean specs of MPEG-4 and it often lead to all kinds of problems.

the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.

yes, it is. (Good Apple; good EMI too btw, even though it took too long until they saw the light)

MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.

It's not odd. Mp3 is the 800 pound gorilla of music formats and noone can do without it. Apple refused to share its DRM system with anyone (bad Apple), so for most competitors WMA was the easiest way to provide customers the capability to buy music (well, Big-4 music) online, thanks to MS's Played-for-Sure(TM) (until they got the URGE(TM) to squirt(TM) stuff all over the place =) and iirc it's the default spit out by WMP if you tell it to encode something for you. Few non-iPod owners use AAC, so there was no real reason to implement it (similar problem as Vorbis).

Re:MP3

[slimjim8094]

Licensing. AAC doesn't require royalties (it's a MPEG standard), but WMA is proprietary.

aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[TheGratefulNet]

and so it will never capture the market share that mp3 based hardware (chip) players have.

I have so many mp3-only players - why on earth would I convert to a diff format when mp3 meets ALL my needs?

now, if all players were firmware upgradable, fine. but the fact is, most are chip based and if there is no
AAC support in the chip, you are SOL.

AAC is a nice idea, but its not 'everywhere'. mp3 IS everywhere. that's all that matters, in the end.

Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[adisakp]

True... but iPods do currently make up something like 75%-80% of the market all by themselves. Thus AAC is one of the predominant portable digital music player formats even if relatively few other players support AAC.

Not to mention quite a few players support AAC without really going out of their way to bullet point it as a feature.... for example Zune players.

Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[BKX]

You're forgetting two things.

First, mp3s cost the online music stores money per song download, whereas AAC does not.

Second, most new players support AAC out of box. Nobody cares about your Rio.

Third, since 80% of mp3 players out there today are iPods (which all support AAC), and most of the rest either support AAC and can be firmware upgraded to support it. Why would the music stores give a crap about supporting the less than 10% of music players that don't do AAC?

Forth, you're not thinking about this from the music stores' points of view. To them, selling DRM'd music costs a certain DRM'd-format-royalty on a per song downloaded basis. Right now, they mostly pay that royalty to Microsoft since they all use WMV, since Microsoft is the only company licensing a DRM'd format. Selling non-DRM'd music makes them free to choose among non-DRM'd formats, and there are a shit ton of them:
WMV: costs money per song, and is only supported by a small number of clients.
MP3: costs money per song as well but is supported by nearly 100% of clients.
AAC: is free and is supported by 90% of current clients and soon to be 100% of future clients. (Even the Zune supports non-DRM'd AAC, and that's saying something.)
Other formats: no format has wide enough support and small enough bandwidth requirements to even be considered.

Which format would you choose?

Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[EggyToast]

From your link:

"# Are there use fees for MPEG-4 Audio?
No. License fees are due on the sale of encoders and/or decoders only. There are no patent license fees due on the distribution of bit-stream encoded in an MPEG-4 Audio format, whether such bit-streams are broadcast, streamed over a network, or provided on physical media.

Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[e4g4]

Especially considering AAC doesn't require royalty payments.
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested: Well, yes and no - semantically, I was considering royalties and patent licensing fees as separate entities. AAC decoder licensing fees run as low as $0.12 per unit, whereas MP3 licensing fees appear to be independent of volume of devices sold and cost ~$0.75 per unit. Additionally, the sale of mp3 files costs the seller 2-3% of their gross revenue from the sales in royalties - the sale of AAC files does not require royalty payments. So yes, while AAC is not free per se, it is in fact cheaper than mp3 for both hardware manufacturers and content distributors.

Re:Apple is just a MSFT wannabe?

[Hawthorne01]

AAC isn't proprietary to Apple, it's part of the MPEG-4 standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

Perfect Timing

[ObligatoryUserName]

Lucent's recent assertion to MP3 patent rights ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/technology/23pat ent.html?ex=1329973200&en=6a3c7d2b220acec5&ei=5124 &partner=digg&exprod=digg ) combined with this move by Apple and EMI probably have doomed MP3 to an also-ran status.

If you're not familiar, everyone who licensed the MP3 patents is now being threatened with a lawsuit by Alcatel-Lucent because they co-own the patent rights, but weren't party to all the licensing that was going on before.

Re:Vorbis? FLAC?

[mattkime]

>>the #1 DAP on the market?

Whats a DAP? Is it like an iPod?

Re:Why not MP3?

[nine-times]

Believe it or not, MP3 actually has more patent issues than AAC at this point. Supposedly, if you run an online store, you have to pay royalties on every song sold to MP3-related patent holders. AFAIK, AACs don't require royalties to be paid per-song. There are also outstanding lawsuits regarding MP3.

So even though it may make sense to you, as a consumer, to stick with mp3, it may not make sense to a business. So if you imagine that MP3 is disqualified, what else is likely to become the defacto standard for online music stores? To answer that, you might want to ask yourself, "Besides MP3, what other formats play on the most popular portable music player?"

Yeah, that pretty much means AAC. It's not that I wouldn't like it to be something that's completely unencumbered by patents, but either way, it's better than dealing with Windows Media files.

Patent issues

[missing000]

I think MP3 has some patent issues.

I think AAC has some patent issues too.