That's all true of every technology. At first it is jarring, after a short while we develop conventions and etiquette. But some people will always be jerks.
I've been using an iPhone as an alarm clock since June, 2007. Of course it is the last thing I touch (to set the alarm) and the first thing I touch (to turn off the alarm.) How is that any worse than touching any alarm clock? Next you will be telling me to wake up according to my natural rhythms like the Industrial Revolution never happened.
Checking on Facebook or Twitter is not the only use of a smartphone. At least not an iPhone. Drawing, painting, recording music and audio, photography, making movies, reading books — all proud human endeavors. Instead of needing a giant house full of hundreds of different technologies (horse hair paint brush, chemical darkroom, grand piano) I can do those things with what I keep in my pocket. And the documents I made open up on a Mac to be prepared for publishing instead of gather dust in the attic.
Except maybe you want to use your eyes, ears, and mouth for something other than computing from time to time?
I can see headphones expanding into a pair of glasses that has a display in them, but why would we want to stop using our hands? Am I going to be able to sculpt a 3D model using Google Glasses? I can do that right now with an iPad mini.
And even if we have glasses with a great display in them, people will complain that they don't come in contact lenses.
10 years of iPods and nobody ever complained that the iPod was not strapped directly onto their head.
There is no online or offline now. And no cyberspace. The Internet is electromagnetic radiation pulsing through your body 24/7, whether you have a smartphone on you or not. I would argue that in that case, a smartphone that enables you to actually use the pervasive Internet radiation is as logical as a pair of corrective glasses that enables you to use visible light.
Humans are inseparable from technology. Our hands are adapted to tools, unlike any other animal.
Playing instruments on iPad or iPhone that are being recorded as MIDI data on a Mac works great. Music has the same need for low latency as gaming controls. The only downside is you generally have to create an ad-hoc network between the devices so that you're not also running Internet over there or whatever other traffic may be on your proper Wi-Fi network.
Also iPads and iPhones running GarageBand can connect via Bluetooth so that you can play instruments on one and record on the other.
If the crazy hippie computer company from Northern California can make virus-free systems for 35 years, what is the excuse from all these “serious” computer and phone makers? Even Mac OS 9 had a system called Software Update that patched half the community within a month and the rest within 3 months.
It's a convenient theory for someone who wants free music, but it's not true.
A user who runs iTunes in 2013 has access to much, much, much, much, much more music than a user who runs Napster in 2000. Not only does iTunes have way more tracks, iTunes has 90 second previews that play instantly, and all the tracks are correctly labeled and of the highest quality possible. And iTunes has a massive installed base. It is the single-most popular Windows app, and it is pre-installed on every Mac, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. A listener who runs iTunes and just goes through browsing music and listening to previews can expand their musical mind as broadly as they like. You'll hear more music than in any record store that ever existed. You'll hear more music than any radio station that ever existed. Just with iTunes previews.
So if your theory were correct, music sales should be much, much bigger now than they were in 2000. The industry should have much, much more money. Yet the industry is much smaller and record sales are much smaller.
What is actually going on is that many listeners mistakenly think that music is free because Napster and others like them told them it was. Why? Because of the Internet. No. That is totally wrong.
The cost of writing, performing, recording, producing, marketing a music album is still there. The cost of studying music, 10 years of practice to get to professional level, and musical instruments is still there. Even the cost of making and shipping copies of music is still there, the CD's and trucks have simply been replaced by servers and bandwidth, especially when listeners expect to download a song again and again and again for the rest of their fucking lives. The cost of an apartment and food and health care (in the US) for the songwriter and musician is still there.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Napster and many others totally missed that reality. Many people in 1995–2000 ignored the cost of servers, the cost of client systems, the cost of bandwidth, the cost of production, the cost of marketing, the cost of curation, because they were living in a fantasy world where Moore's Law was somehow going to make all that stuff free. Since then, we have learned that is not the case. Analog costs have been replaced with digital costs. The cost of music has come down somewhat, but it has not come down to free or even near-free.
> Try to watch a music documentary from the past 50 years. Find one where the label wasn't fucking the artist over.
Sure, there are always people trying to fuck music artists over. Sure, many labels fucked over artists and it makes a great music documentary, but notice those artists also got paid in most cases. Bruce Springsteen could not record any music for 3 years during his prime because a label fucked him over, but Bruce Springsteen is also a very rich man because most of his listeners paid for his music. As a result, he is still around in his 60's to make even more music. He did not die because he couldn't afford a medical procedure or a roof over his head in his 40's.
One answer to shitty labels is for the listener to fuck the artist over directly by not paying for music. That is not better. The real answer to shitty record labels is independent record labels, for example Sub Pop from the fucking 1980's which brought us Nirvana. Those music documentaries which turned the listener off from shitty labels that fuck over their artists were also helpful. The answer to shitty record labels is not nobody-pays-for-music-anymore.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. No free music until there is free food, housing, studio space, servers, server admins, bandwidth, medical care, education, instruments, production tools, and so on. It's basic economics.
What you are saying is curation is worth paying for. And you know what NAS is. Imagine the 99% of the world that has no idea how to manage digital media files or servers. It's clear that we require a system where the viewer/listener can simply and easily access the content they want, and it's clear that viewers/listeners have to pay into the pot to fund not only the production of the content, but also the curation of it. When viewers get a 4KTV they will want 4K content. When iPods and iPhones and iPads can play 24-bit 96kHz audio they will want 24-bit 96kHz content. In most cases, the 4K and 24/96 versions of today's content already exists in the studio, but has no commercial outlet. The end user who rips a friend's CD for free does a lot of work but doesn't get the song “for life” like someone who simply buys the iTunes version and will get higher-fidelity updates later on.
What's funny is that the computer nerds at iTunes and Netflix sure expect to be paid for setting up the servers and bandwidth, even if they were running Napster 10 years ago. Nerds are willing to setup a NAS for themselves for free, but not for others. Yet they expect music producers to work for free. It's part of the myth that making music is fun and easy. No. Sitting around playing an acoustic guitar on the beach while getting high with your friends — that is fun and easy. Actually creating some new music and arranging it and performing it and recording it and producing it and marketing it — that is a fuck of a lot of work. And in spite of falling prices for digital tools, musical instruments and studio space and the large amount of time required and apartments and food and healthcare (in the US) are MORE expensive than before. So the idea that you can enjoy all the content you want but not kick in a few dollars is really wrong-headed.
That is paranoid rambling. The RIAA is not nearly that powerful. Record producers are hardly the only ones who were blindsided by the pace of change in computing technology and the new realities of the Internet.
Much, much more time, energy, and money goes into making a record than you probably imagine. Most musicians play for 10 years before they record an original record. They paid teachers, colleges, musical instrument makers and stores many thousands of dollars and suffered callouses and tendonitis and bus crashes and a thousands of dollars so that they could show up at a recording session and lay down the drums for that song you like. Songwriters typically only get 10% of their work published, if that. Most record producers don't find success until they are in their 40's, if they find it at all. And all they ask for in return is for the music collector to chip in a little bit after-the-fact, whether they are an end user buying a track from iTunes or on CD, or whether they are a radio station or music subscription service offering tracks to the more casual listener who doesn't want to collect.
If you want to know how it felt to be an RIAA member in 2000, imagine your boss introducing you to a humanoid robot who is going to sit at your desk and do your job from now on, and he expects you to LIKE IT. He expects to not have to drag you kicking and screaming into the humanoid-robot-takes-your-job world where you get paid NOTHING yet still have to buy groceries, pay rent, pay for health care if in US — just like songwriters, musicians, and audio producers.
Another example of how it felt to be an RIAA member in 2000 would be if your stock broker came to you and said all stocks are free now thanks to the Internet, your portfolio and pension is worth $0. And he expects to not have to drag you kicking and screaming into the stocks-are-free world. Hey, it's the INTERNET! So fuck you!
Moore's Law outpaces everybody. If you want to complain about somebody not keeping up with the times, start with your government.
You weren't going to buy anyway. Nobody lost anything because you didn't participate.
If you want to listen to a guy play guitar but not put money in the guitar case, that is your right. Doesn't make you a better person than someone who listens and drops some money in, though. Especially not if you are in the United States, which lacks even a public health care system. So what you are saying is that music should be free and artists should go without health care.
If you want to go to a pot luck dinner and not bring anything, you can do that too. Also doesn't make you a better person than somebody show showed up with a casserole.
DAT and MP3/MP4 are the best examples of Sony fucking it up.
In order to “protect content” they ruined DAT by disallowing digital-to-digital copies, which were necessary since DAT tape is fragile, and therefore a DAT recording would break and be gone forever because it was unprotected by backups. Considering that most DAT users were musicians and audio producers, they destroyed a lot of content, not protected it.
And they pushed their crazy “protected” ATRAC format and Mini-Disc instead of MP3/MP4. Brutal mistake when consumers were already buying “unprotected” CD audio.
No need to worry about Sony since they are going out of business any moment now.
I know you meant well, but your post is fact-free.
Nobody tried to ban the player piano — the issue was that the player piano makers did not want to pay artists for the scrolls. They expected to make money off the music without kicking anything back to the people who made it. Many songwriters had the equivalent of a platinum album on piano roll and were fucking homeless.
Sony did not try to ban the VCR. They tried to stop the manufacture of VHS VCR's because they were too much of a copy of Sony's Betamax VCR's. Has nothing to do with content except that having 2 kinds of videocassette (or 2 kinds of anything, such as next-generation DVD) is really, really bad for consumer sales and fucks up the whole market for everybody. That is why content creators are RABID supporters of ISO MPEG media standards. Every time there are 2 formats, consumer content sales crash and it hurts everybody.
Wow. Frank Zappa is a “right-wing zealot” because he expected a listener to chip in along with the other listeners to cover the cost of the writing and production and performance of the music? That is amazing!
If you go to a pot luck dinner empty-handed and somebody calls you on it, I guess they are also a “right-wing zealot?”
If you get a drink at a bar and the bartender expects a tip — fucking “right-wing zealot!”
It's good to know there are people like you out there, working tirelessly every day of their lives for free. You are working for free, right? If not, you're a “right-wing zealot.”
In iTunes, what you are buying is essentially a lifetime proof-of-purchase. The tracks in iTunes that you have not bought show a price next to them, and the tracks that you have bought show a download button. You can also see all your purchases as a list and download any of them again. They download in the highest quality available today, even if you bought them at a lower quality.
It makes no sense today to buy a song unless you get that kind of proof-of-purchase. Just possessing a copy of the track is not nearly as valuable because you are responsible for storing it, backing it up, not losing it in a house fire, and for upgrading it to a higher-fidelity version in the future, which will likely cost you money. You may also be responsible in some cases for proving that you actually paid for that track. Apple takes care of all of this for you when you buy from iTunes. That is what makes iTunes music worth collecting, if there are songs that you like so much that you want to have them available for life. If you don't like a song that much, enjoy it in another more-temporary context like radio or subscription.
> Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
That is not true of the “Mastered for iTunes” masters and remasters. The primary instruction from Apple in the Mastered for iTunes documentation is not to crush the dynamic range, because that can be done by Apple when they generate the AAC (or other future format) consumer audio file, or by the listener on the playback device via SoundCheck — but the dynamic range cannot be put back by Apple or the listener if it is fucked in the original master. A full dynamic range is the single most important reason to do a Mastered for iTunes remaster.
Apple's master library supports up to 32-bit 192kHz audio, which has a much larger soundscape than CD, and they look at it as an important cultural resource because in 10 or 20 years, iTunes may be the only one who has some of those masters, because of the temporary nature of many music artists, their record companies, most music retailers, and so on. So Apple basically pleads with audio producers to give them a timeless master: the highest-quality recording you have, with the full dynamic range of the recording intact. One that they can use today to generate AAC, but also use in a few years to generate a 24-bit 96kHz version for the consumer.
Essentially, Apple is asking music producers NOT to master their stuff. They're saying “give us what you were listening to in the studio and we'll give as much of that to the consumer as we can today, and even more tomorrow.” The post-processing of the mix gets done by Apple, same as with YouTube you can upload a 4K and they will make every kind of tiny, low-bandwidth version.
On CD, if you crush the dynamic range, you should louder than the next CD. But with an iPod with SoundCheck turned on, everything is the same loudness, and a crushed dynamic range comes through simply as a crushed dynamic range. So we are moving out of the loudness-above-all era of music. It will take some time because it is expensive to remaster and nobody in music has any money, but at least there is a way forward articulated by Apple via Mastered for iTunes.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he didn't mean depersonalize. He said emasculate. If he meant depersonalize he would have corrected himself within at least a few hours.
He really is saying that iPhone is an effete designer toy and Google Glass is a real he-man tech.
That's all true of every technology. At first it is jarring, after a short while we develop conventions and etiquette. But some people will always be jerks.
The irony of Googlebot trying to humanize you by strapping a computer to your head is outrageous.
I've been using an iPhone as an alarm clock since June, 2007. Of course it is the last thing I touch (to set the alarm) and the first thing I touch (to turn off the alarm.) How is that any worse than touching any alarm clock? Next you will be telling me to wake up according to my natural rhythms like the Industrial Revolution never happened.
Checking on Facebook or Twitter is not the only use of a smartphone. At least not an iPhone. Drawing, painting, recording music and audio, photography, making movies, reading books — all proud human endeavors. Instead of needing a giant house full of hundreds of different technologies (horse hair paint brush, chemical darkroom, grand piano) I can do those things with what I keep in my pocket. And the documents I made open up on a Mac to be prepared for publishing instead of gather dust in the attic.
What are “papers?”
Depends on the woman.
Many folks would rather have brain implants than wear glasses.
Except maybe you want to use your eyes, ears, and mouth for something other than computing from time to time?
I can see headphones expanding into a pair of glasses that has a display in them, but why would we want to stop using our hands? Am I going to be able to sculpt a 3D model using Google Glasses? I can do that right now with an iPad mini.
And even if we have glasses with a great display in them, people will complain that they don't come in contact lenses.
10 years of iPods and nobody ever complained that the iPod was not strapped directly onto their head.
There is no online or offline now. And no cyberspace. The Internet is electromagnetic radiation pulsing through your body 24/7, whether you have a smartphone on you or not. I would argue that in that case, a smartphone that enables you to actually use the pervasive Internet radiation is as logical as a pair of corrective glasses that enables you to use visible light.
Humans are inseparable from technology. Our hands are adapted to tools, unlike any other animal.
... the last thing many people touch before going to sleep and the first thing they touch after waking.
You follow the anti-smartphone arguments down the rabbit hole and we're all naked and living in caves.
’Nuff said.
Playing instruments on iPad or iPhone that are being recorded as MIDI data on a Mac works great. Music has the same need for low latency as gaming controls. The only downside is you generally have to create an ad-hoc network between the devices so that you're not also running Internet over there or whatever other traffic may be on your proper Wi-Fi network.
Also iPads and iPhones running GarageBand can connect via Bluetooth so that you can play instruments on one and record on the other.
Everyone but Apple is guilty of this.
which both have more viruses than apps.
If the crazy hippie computer company from Northern California can make virus-free systems for 35 years, what is the excuse from all these “serious” computer and phone makers? Even Mac OS 9 had a system called Software Update that patched half the community within a month and the rest within 3 months.
It's a convenient theory for someone who wants free music, but it's not true.
A user who runs iTunes in 2013 has access to much, much, much, much, much more music than a user who runs Napster in 2000. Not only does iTunes have way more tracks, iTunes has 90 second previews that play instantly, and all the tracks are correctly labeled and of the highest quality possible. And iTunes has a massive installed base. It is the single-most popular Windows app, and it is pre-installed on every Mac, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. A listener who runs iTunes and just goes through browsing music and listening to previews can expand their musical mind as broadly as they like. You'll hear more music than in any record store that ever existed. You'll hear more music than any radio station that ever existed. Just with iTunes previews.
So if your theory were correct, music sales should be much, much bigger now than they were in 2000. The industry should have much, much more money. Yet the industry is much smaller and record sales are much smaller.
What is actually going on is that many listeners mistakenly think that music is free because Napster and others like them told them it was. Why? Because of the Internet. No. That is totally wrong.
The cost of writing, performing, recording, producing, marketing a music album is still there. The cost of studying music, 10 years of practice to get to professional level, and musical instruments is still there. Even the cost of making and shipping copies of music is still there, the CD's and trucks have simply been replaced by servers and bandwidth, especially when listeners expect to download a song again and again and again for the rest of their fucking lives. The cost of an apartment and food and health care (in the US) for the songwriter and musician is still there.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Napster and many others totally missed that reality. Many people in 1995–2000 ignored the cost of servers, the cost of client systems, the cost of bandwidth, the cost of production, the cost of marketing, the cost of curation, because they were living in a fantasy world where Moore's Law was somehow going to make all that stuff free. Since then, we have learned that is not the case. Analog costs have been replaced with digital costs. The cost of music has come down somewhat, but it has not come down to free or even near-free.
> Try to watch a music documentary from the past 50 years. Find one where the label wasn't fucking the artist over.
Sure, there are always people trying to fuck music artists over. Sure, many labels fucked over artists and it makes a great music documentary, but notice those artists also got paid in most cases. Bruce Springsteen could not record any music for 3 years during his prime because a label fucked him over, but Bruce Springsteen is also a very rich man because most of his listeners paid for his music. As a result, he is still around in his 60's to make even more music. He did not die because he couldn't afford a medical procedure or a roof over his head in his 40's.
One answer to shitty labels is for the listener to fuck the artist over directly by not paying for music. That is not better. The real answer to shitty record labels is independent record labels, for example Sub Pop from the fucking 1980's which brought us Nirvana. Those music documentaries which turned the listener off from shitty labels that fuck over their artists were also helpful. The answer to shitty record labels is not nobody-pays-for-music-anymore.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. No free music until there is free food, housing, studio space, servers, server admins, bandwidth, medical care, education, instruments, production tools, and so on. It's basic economics.
What you are saying is curation is worth paying for. And you know what NAS is. Imagine the 99% of the world that has no idea how to manage digital media files or servers. It's clear that we require a system where the viewer/listener can simply and easily access the content they want, and it's clear that viewers/listeners have to pay into the pot to fund not only the production of the content, but also the curation of it. When viewers get a 4KTV they will want 4K content. When iPods and iPhones and iPads can play 24-bit 96kHz audio they will want 24-bit 96kHz content. In most cases, the 4K and 24/96 versions of today's content already exists in the studio, but has no commercial outlet. The end user who rips a friend's CD for free does a lot of work but doesn't get the song “for life” like someone who simply buys the iTunes version and will get higher-fidelity updates later on.
What's funny is that the computer nerds at iTunes and Netflix sure expect to be paid for setting up the servers and bandwidth, even if they were running Napster 10 years ago. Nerds are willing to setup a NAS for themselves for free, but not for others. Yet they expect music producers to work for free. It's part of the myth that making music is fun and easy. No. Sitting around playing an acoustic guitar on the beach while getting high with your friends — that is fun and easy. Actually creating some new music and arranging it and performing it and recording it and producing it and marketing it — that is a fuck of a lot of work. And in spite of falling prices for digital tools, musical instruments and studio space and the large amount of time required and apartments and food and healthcare (in the US) are MORE expensive than before. So the idea that you can enjoy all the content you want but not kick in a few dollars is really wrong-headed.
That is paranoid rambling. The RIAA is not nearly that powerful. Record producers are hardly the only ones who were blindsided by the pace of change in computing technology and the new realities of the Internet.
Much, much more time, energy, and money goes into making a record than you probably imagine. Most musicians play for 10 years before they record an original record. They paid teachers, colleges, musical instrument makers and stores many thousands of dollars and suffered callouses and tendonitis and bus crashes and a thousands of dollars so that they could show up at a recording session and lay down the drums for that song you like. Songwriters typically only get 10% of their work published, if that. Most record producers don't find success until they are in their 40's, if they find it at all. And all they ask for in return is for the music collector to chip in a little bit after-the-fact, whether they are an end user buying a track from iTunes or on CD, or whether they are a radio station or music subscription service offering tracks to the more casual listener who doesn't want to collect.
If you want to know how it felt to be an RIAA member in 2000, imagine your boss introducing you to a humanoid robot who is going to sit at your desk and do your job from now on, and he expects you to LIKE IT. He expects to not have to drag you kicking and screaming into the humanoid-robot-takes-your-job world where you get paid NOTHING yet still have to buy groceries, pay rent, pay for health care if in US — just like songwriters, musicians, and audio producers.
Another example of how it felt to be an RIAA member in 2000 would be if your stock broker came to you and said all stocks are free now thanks to the Internet, your portfolio and pension is worth $0. And he expects to not have to drag you kicking and screaming into the stocks-are-free world. Hey, it's the INTERNET! So fuck you!
Moore's Law outpaces everybody. If you want to complain about somebody not keeping up with the times, start with your government.
Did your message say “stop using Windows?” That would be the only way to fix their security flaw.
Proper backup of Windows 98 is not possible. There is always a wipe-and-install.
You weren't going to buy anyway. Nobody lost anything because you didn't participate.
If you want to listen to a guy play guitar but not put money in the guitar case, that is your right. Doesn't make you a better person than someone who listens and drops some money in, though. Especially not if you are in the United States, which lacks even a public health care system. So what you are saying is that music should be free and artists should go without health care.
If you want to go to a pot luck dinner and not bring anything, you can do that too. Also doesn't make you a better person than somebody show showed up with a casserole.
DAT and MP3/MP4 are the best examples of Sony fucking it up.
In order to “protect content” they ruined DAT by disallowing digital-to-digital copies, which were necessary since DAT tape is fragile, and therefore a DAT recording would break and be gone forever because it was unprotected by backups. Considering that most DAT users were musicians and audio producers, they destroyed a lot of content, not protected it.
And they pushed their crazy “protected” ATRAC format and Mini-Disc instead of MP3/MP4. Brutal mistake when consumers were already buying “unprotected” CD audio.
No need to worry about Sony since they are going out of business any moment now.
I know you meant well, but your post is fact-free.
Nobody tried to ban the player piano — the issue was that the player piano makers did not want to pay artists for the scrolls. They expected to make money off the music without kicking anything back to the people who made it. Many songwriters had the equivalent of a platinum album on piano roll and were fucking homeless.
Sony did not try to ban the VCR. They tried to stop the manufacture of VHS VCR's because they were too much of a copy of Sony's Betamax VCR's. Has nothing to do with content except that having 2 kinds of videocassette (or 2 kinds of anything, such as next-generation DVD) is really, really bad for consumer sales and fucks up the whole market for everybody. That is why content creators are RABID supporters of ISO MPEG media standards. Every time there are 2 formats, consumer content sales crash and it hurts everybody.
Wow. Frank Zappa is a “right-wing zealot” because he expected a listener to chip in along with the other listeners to cover the cost of the writing and production and performance of the music? That is amazing!
If you go to a pot luck dinner empty-handed and somebody calls you on it, I guess they are also a “right-wing zealot?”
If you get a drink at a bar and the bartender expects a tip — fucking “right-wing zealot!”
It's good to know there are people like you out there, working tirelessly every day of their lives for free. You are working for free, right? If not, you're a “right-wing zealot.”
In iTunes, what you are buying is essentially a lifetime proof-of-purchase. The tracks in iTunes that you have not bought show a price next to them, and the tracks that you have bought show a download button. You can also see all your purchases as a list and download any of them again. They download in the highest quality available today, even if you bought them at a lower quality.
It makes no sense today to buy a song unless you get that kind of proof-of-purchase. Just possessing a copy of the track is not nearly as valuable because you are responsible for storing it, backing it up, not losing it in a house fire, and for upgrading it to a higher-fidelity version in the future, which will likely cost you money. You may also be responsible in some cases for proving that you actually paid for that track. Apple takes care of all of this for you when you buy from iTunes. That is what makes iTunes music worth collecting, if there are songs that you like so much that you want to have them available for life. If you don't like a song that much, enjoy it in another more-temporary context like radio or subscription.
> Remastered is just code for "we fucked the dynamic range to make it louder"
That is not true of the “Mastered for iTunes” masters and remasters. The primary instruction from Apple in the Mastered for iTunes documentation is not to crush the dynamic range, because that can be done by Apple when they generate the AAC (or other future format) consumer audio file, or by the listener on the playback device via SoundCheck — but the dynamic range cannot be put back by Apple or the listener if it is fucked in the original master. A full dynamic range is the single most important reason to do a Mastered for iTunes remaster.
Apple's master library supports up to 32-bit 192kHz audio, which has a much larger soundscape than CD, and they look at it as an important cultural resource because in 10 or 20 years, iTunes may be the only one who has some of those masters, because of the temporary nature of many music artists, their record companies, most music retailers, and so on. So Apple basically pleads with audio producers to give them a timeless master: the highest-quality recording you have, with the full dynamic range of the recording intact. One that they can use today to generate AAC, but also use in a few years to generate a 24-bit 96kHz version for the consumer.
Essentially, Apple is asking music producers NOT to master their stuff. They're saying “give us what you were listening to in the studio and we'll give as much of that to the consumer as we can today, and even more tomorrow.” The post-processing of the mix gets done by Apple, same as with YouTube you can upload a 4K and they will make every kind of tiny, low-bandwidth version.
On CD, if you crush the dynamic range, you should louder than the next CD. But with an iPod with SoundCheck turned on, everything is the same loudness, and a crushed dynamic range comes through simply as a crushed dynamic range. So we are moving out of the loudness-above-all era of music. It will take some time because it is expensive to remaster and nobody in music has any money, but at least there is a way forward articulated by Apple via Mastered for iTunes.