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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.'"
I thought software was supposed to improve with time?
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.
Exactly! I don't understand why more people don't invest their $26 million in order to live off the interest?
Why don't more people have their butlers find for them a good financial advisor?
Mitt.
For all the tales of horror with iTunes, I guess I'm the only happy user.
You say this service has been around 10 years, aye? I've never had to use it. Seems like such an important service.
QFT. Why is Slashdot covering services not used by Eggplant62?
And I've never installed Linux on a home machine (though I have been looking into it, to be fair). Clearly it's unimportant too? Or are we only excluding things that you've not used?
The iTunes Store is currently the largest digital music distribution service available in terms of downloads, and as of last year, digital sales numbers passed those of physical media. That you're not using a service does not mean it's not noteworthy. Considering it was the first big service of this sort and set the stage for all of the ones that followed, looking back on the last 10 years of it seems to make sense.
What's even neater is that you'd be dead of old age before you could listen to all of it. (Feel free to run the numbers, I did. I assumed a 3 minute track, life expectancy of 100, that you started listening at birth, and that you don't need to sleep.) You still can't get through it all.)
Actually I'm not sure if that's neat or not... more sad really.
Speaking as an Apple fan, I agree entirely that it needs to die in a fire already.
That said, this story is about the iTunes Store, which just turned 10 and is actually pretty decent, not the iTunes software, which is over 12 years old at this point. iOS devices haven't required the iTunes software to do updates or sync for a few years now, and they've been capable of making purchases from the iTunes Store without having to use the software since the very beginning.
But when it comes to complaining about the iTunes software, I'm right there with you complaining about it. On Windows it's buggy, bloated, unfriendly towards users, and has a history of bad behavior (e.g. the auto-installing Safari thing). On Mac, it's inconsistent with other UI paradigms, poorly structured, and breaks from the usual UNIX and Mac way of making separate tools for each task.
In contrast, the iTunes Store, while not the easiest thing to navigate, does have a number of extremely nice features going for it, beyond just helping to pave the way for later entrants in the field. Besides which, it remains the largest digital music platform, and with digital music sales finally passing physical sales as of 2012, it makes sense to look back on the history first big digital music store that is currently the biggest music store period.
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.
The real revolution was that Apple became a big enough player with the iPod to force the hand of the big 5 of the RIAA to actually offer their music online in digital form for what many people deemed a fair enough price to not pirate. It seems commonplace now in 2013 enough to forget, but in the mid 2000s there were very options for consumers to get their music online, and one could argue this was one of the bigger reasons for online piracy. We see echoes of this still today as the news reported last week that the HBO show Game of Thrones is one of the biggest pirated shows online, and some would argue this is because of consumer's perceived lack of options for watching it online. Apple challenged the old distribution model and won, that's what the story is.
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.
That is "Just Broken", on a Android you don't need a third party program :). Having to remember such a complicated hierarchy of directories...and still use a third party program is a disgrace. iOS is so complicated.
Remembering directories is for Android users. There's no user file handling involved whatsoever in the Amazon/Apple process. Amazon's store downloads it to that directory. iTunes picks it up from that directory. That's implementation. User doesn't have to know that any more than they have to know HTML to read a web page.
When iTunes music had DRM, most computers had CD-RW's.
For the past 5 years, all iTunes music has been sold as unencrypted AAC files that can be played on any phone.
Before anyone else posts, AAC is not an Apple format, was standardised years before the iPod was introduced, and is one of the required supported formats for Android.
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.