Slashdot Mirror
Universal Refuses To Renew On iTunes
UnknowingFool writes "It appears for the moment that Universal will not renew its long term contract with Apple for content on the iTunes store. While the details are not known about the exact nature of the dispute, many speculate that it has to do with Apple's stance on fixed pricing and Apple's refusal to license their DRM. The worse case scenario may include Universal pulling its entire catalog from iTunes. Both sides stand to lose out with 1/3 of of new releases coming from Universal and an estimated 15% of Universal's sales coming from digital downloads. Apple's market share is about 75% of digital downloads, and digital downloads are growing while CD sales are shrinking."
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Simple really. They are not selling enough through iTunes to make it worthwhile. This is because iPod people do not buy many tunes. So they figure, we are losing more to piracy than we are making. Now, lets see, what if we sold non-DRM that would play on anything. Would that be better or worse? Probably better. We could hardly lose more to piracy than we are now. But why rush it? In the meantime, lets go month to month while we do a bit more research and see which way the cat will jump. And whether iPhone will sell.
Personally, I think its the first of the spring cracks in the ice. I don't think the iPod iTunes locked business model will last much longer. Like, not more than a year. Just like the locked iPhone model will not, and I think with Leopard we will see the locked OS model fall to bits. But we will see.
When will the world see? Where the nigger runs the show, corruption and suffering run rampant.
Apple should give Universal a cut of each ipod/iphone sold - as long as Universal gives Apple a cut for every CD sold. That would be fair.
There is no security when liberty is sacrificed.