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iTunes Store Turns 10
An anonymous reader writes
"On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store. In their original press release, they called it 'revolutionary,' in typical PR fashion. As the service reaches its 10th anniversary, it seems they were actually correct. From The Verge: 'At launch, it was Mac-only and offered a relatively tiny catalog: 200,000 songs (it currently has 26 million). But it did have the support of the major record labels of the day: Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony, and BMG. The partnerships were key to helping Apple take control of music distribution — without the songs, the iPod was a nicely designed but empty box. ... Jobs certainly had his challenges. Vidich said he's the one who suggested that iTunes charge 99 cents per track and he remembers Jobs nearly hugged him. At the time, Sony Music execs wanted to charge more than $3 a track, according to Vidich. No doubt a $3 song price would have tied an anchor around iTunes' neck, stifling growth. 99 cents, on the other hand, was below the sub-$1 psychological barrier — and has continued to be an important price point for not only music but the wide swath of 99-cent iOS apps in the store. ... Apple bet that the majority of consumers wouldn't have an issue with its lock-in tactics, and it bet correctly.'"
Originally, iTunes had DRM on music so it could only be played while iTunes was connected to your account (not always on). They removed the DRM later for music. It's still there for movies.
itunes is very much part of the iPod success story. It was a horrible bit of software that should be burned with fire. For those of us who used platforms that it didn't work on, it made owning an iPod/iPhone a nightmare, and used to prop up Apples monopoly in the Mp3 players (thank god they Jobs was stopped with books). It was used by Jobs to destroy Firefox unsuccessfully by forcing people to use Safari. It tangles itself to the OS in unpleasantly hard to remove ways. Its still used to update devices!? Play turned 1 a couple of weeks ago without much fanfair, and works through a browser, or native on Android hardware.
Its one redeeming feature is it popularised 3-plane music players. Personally though I'm using Clementine which is everything right about a music player.
Originally, iTunes had DRM on music so it could only be played while iTunes was connected to your account (not always on). They removed the DRM later for music. It's still there for movies.
The article is incorrect to say this addition is Apple's - applying DRM was a prerequisite of the music industry for the licensing agreement with Apple. No DRM, no license. The removal of DRM has only happened because the music industry finally saw the writing on the wall and allowed Apple (and others) to remove it.
The movie industry isn't so enlightened yet. I avoid buying films through iTunes or alternatives, because it is far too easy to fall into a situation where you can't watch the media you legally purchased. We moved house recently and our ISP was late reconnecting us - for that period of time (over a month) we couldn't watch any films we previously purchased online because they required an Internet connection for authorisation. I'm longing for the day the movie industry wakes up to its poor treatment of customers and removes these DRM constraints.
Originally, iTunes had DRM on music so it could only be played while iTunes was connected to your account (not always on). They removed the DRM later for music. It's still there for movies.
The article is incorrect to say this addition is Apple's - applying DRM was a prerequisite of the music industry for the licensing agreement with Apple. No DRM, no license. The removal of DRM has only happened because the music industry finally saw the writing on the wall and allowed Apple (and others) to remove it.
Apple have this perception that they pushed for removing DRM, which might be true, but it is interesting that at the time of iTunes DRM the competing WMA "plays for sure" (*) stores actually had less DRM restrictions than Apple (you could keep and use more copies of the songs on more devices simultaneously, burn more copies, re-download if license lost, etc - iTunes caught up on some of these eventually but was not in the lead for less DRM). And it was Amazon who was first with a full DRM-free music catalogue, and at the same price (at the time iTunes had started selling some DRM free tracks at a higher price than non-DRM).
This might be that the record companies were stricter with Apple than everybody else (which would be the opposite of the story that Apple used their power to force the record companies). But at the time Apple had a clear advantage from the lock-in that DRM gave the iPod/iTunes ecosystem in the beginning, so not sure how much they really disliked this situation for a while at least.
(*) Plays for sure became a joke when Microsoft abandoned it, but at the time I used it because my Sansa player supported it.
pple don't allow alternative stores on their (not your) devices, so buying from Amazon has extra problems :)
Are you clueless or just trying to be obnoxious? Any music that you buy from Amazon ends up in your iTunes library automatically. There is an amazingly simple API that you can use to put songs into the iTunes library: Just move it into the folder "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Automatically Add to iTunes". Which is what Amazon does.
Apple have this perception that they pushed for removing DRM, which might be true, but it is interesting that at the time of iTunes DRM the competing WMA "plays for sure" (*) stores actually had less DRM restrictions than Apple (you could keep and use more copies of the songs on more devices simultaneously, burn more copies, re-download if license lost, etc
"Plays for sure" - see, that's where the problem with your argument starts. PlaysForSure was introduced late in 2004 - IOW over a year after the iTunes DRM.
But that's just a technicality, so let's look at the actual competition. http://www.salon.com/2003/04/29/itunes/
I have seen the future of music and its name is iTunes
[...] Many online music services are on the market, but they’ve all done poorly, most likely because, as Jobs said, they all “treat you like a criminal.” For the most part, the other services are subscription based — users pay a $10 or $20 per-month fee for access to a catalog of songs, and they must put up with a Byzantine set of rules outlining how they can use the tracks. Some services only offer “streaming” music, meaning that you have to be connected to the Internet when you want to listen to your songs; others let you download songs so long as you play them on a single machine (forget about transferring them to portable MP3 players); a few services let you burn songs to CDs, but only for selected tracks for an extra per-song fee. The worst part is, you have to keep paying to get the music; once you cancel your subscription, you can no longer listen to many of the tracks you’ve downloaded.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/05/12/342289/
Universal and Sony rolled out a joint venture called Pressplay. AOL Time Warner (the parent of both Warner and FORTUNE's publisher), Bertelsmann (BMG's owner), EMI, and RealNetworks launched MusicNet. But instead of trying to cooperate to attract customers, the two ventures competed to dominate the digital market. Pressplay wouldn't license its songs to MusicNet, and MusicNet withheld its tunes from Pressplay.
[...]The record companies were also fearful about doing anything that might cannibalize CD sales. So they decided to "rent" people music through the Internet. You paid a monthly subscription fee for songs from MusicNet and Pressplay. But you could download MusicNet tunes onto only one computer, and they disappeared if you didn't pay your bill. That may have protected the record companies from piracy, but it didn't do much for consumers. Why fork over $10 a month for a subscription when you can't do anything with your music but listen to it on your PC? Pressplay launched with CD burning but only for a limited number of songs.
At the end of last year, Pressplay and MusicNet licensed their catalogues to each other, ending their standoff. MusicNet also now permits subscribers to burn certain songs onto CDs. But MusicNet users still can't download songs onto portable players. "These devices haven't caught on yet," insists MusicNet CEO Alan McGlade. Never mind that U.S. sales of portable MP3 players soared from 724,000 in 2001 to 1.6 million last year. Pressplay, for its part, lets subscribers download some songs onto devices, but only those that use Microsoft's Windows Media software. That means no iPods.
But I'm sure you can come up with others that were around at the time the iTunes Music Store came out.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.