I don’t know how many people here pay attention to such things, but Apple Computer has unveiled a new legal, digital music service that I think is exactly the model that the industry should have adopted years ago.
They’ve currently got about 200,000 songs available, from all the major labels – though their selection is wide, it’s not extremely deep, and I hope it fleshes out over time. Individual songs are available for $0.99, and most albums can be had for $9.99. I think both are very fair prices.
The songs are in AAC format, the audio layer of MPEG-4. They include enough digital rights management to prevent you from sharing the files with a million strangers. But you can burn CDs from them, put them on your iPod, and copy them to up to three of your Macs.
The service is Mac-only initially, but should expand to include Windows users by the end of the year. Purchasing is one-click easy, like Amazon.com. It’s really all very well integrated and usable.
I was wondering, though, what people think of the potential of such a business plan? For me, this is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I know you’ll never get the immoral or teenagers to pay for the music they take offline, but I think there’s a big potential market out there for legally available, logically price music. Or am I perhaps being a bit pollyanish?
I think it’s a great idea and a long overdue one. Almost makes me wish I was a Mac owner. (IIRC, only Mac users can use it ATM, no?)
One question, though. Are you sure you can burn CDs from them? Seems like that would introduce a flaw to the don’t share this song with your whole neighborhood protection. I know you can DL it to your iPod, but I thought that was it for portability…
Says that you can burn up to ten CD’s of the unchanged playlist, and unlimited copies of the individual songs. Obviously, you could then rip that CD to MP3’s and share it, but the lovely thing about filesharing is that it’s mostly based on greed, not altruism. Also, at that point, it is less dangerous piracy-wise than a CD you bought at the music store, because you already have a perfectly serviceable digital version of it. If the song plays on my CD player, my iPod, and my computer, I’m not going to bother ripping mp3’s for all the kiddies on the block to play with. Dig?
It’s a great idea long overdue, by its nature a compromise, but I think it’s the best we’re going to see.
I’m not sure what I think about the plan yet. My initial reaction is mostly happiness that finally, there’s been some kind of compromise to legally distribute mainstream music online. As both someone who wants to be able to legally download music and a less-than-rabid-but-still-loyal Mac user, I’m really pleased that Apple undertook the effort. I hope Music Store succeeds.
System requirements for you Mac users:
Mac OS X (10.1.5 minimum, 10.2.5 recommended)
A Mac with built-in USB ports
400MHz G3 processor
256MB RAM recommended
QuickTime 6.2 recommended
Also, I think it can be safely inferred that the fatter your broadband connection, the better.
I just bought Mozart’s Requiem to test it out. Very cool service, I wish it was slightly cheaper though, perhaps 79¢ a song, $6.99 for an album…
Having all the songs the same price is kinda silly though, it seems like a one-minute song should be cheaper than a ten minute one. Still, a good concept, it will be interesting to see how it pans out in the long term.
OK I am 47 years old, so I won’t be looking for new music. Mostly looking for one hit wonders or other classic rock songs.
The first tune I check for is Hand Picked by Richard Betts formerly of the Allman Brothers.
Good News! The Apple iTunes Music Store has Hand Picked
Bad News I have to buy the whole album for $9.99. The other 5 songs on the album are available for 99¢ each. But the 14 minute bluegrassy instrumental I have been searching for is full price.
It figures, how will they make money on 99¢ transactions?
Re: CDs. As someone said, you can burn from the .m4p files to CD. You could then, if you wish, rip the files to .mp3, but the thing is that you’re encoding the CD from a compressed, lossy source. Sure, the CD will sound fine, but if you were to then turn around and export .mp3 files from that CD, you’re layering lossy compression atop lossy compression, and the resulting files will sound kinda crappy.
Re: Price. I expect to see some variance, as the system expands. Apparently, Apple is paying the labels an average of $0.65 per track, which would set a floor on how low the price could go. But once they start rolling out large amounts of back-catalogue music (which I’m hoping they’ll do), I’d expect to see those songs be a little less. And probably we’ll see new-release stuff and perhaps preview-release tracks priced at $1.50 or so in the future. Fan reaction to the service’ll probably dictate that sorta thing.
I’m really stoked. I just bought like two albums and several other tracks off of it. Painless, and the downloads are really, really quick. Now it’s time to go through and replace all my… err, borrowed, music with legimate copies.
Right now I’m burning a CD (on my external Sony Firewire CD-RW drive) of the 4 pieces of music I bought today:
Karelia Suite, composed by Jean Sibelius, conducted by Arthur Fiedler
Theme from “Cat People”, sung by David Bowie
End title to movie “Robin and Marian”, by John Barry
L’Enfant, by Vangelis
An odd selection to be sure. I wish there was more, but it wasn’t bad. I had a hankering for some Edward Elgar (Classical) but when I clicked on his name, it was a broken link. Obviously, some bugs need to be worked out. But for me, it was pretty easy. I did have to quit iTunes and restart it, because at first my download of David Bowie didn’t take (an “error”). But as soon as iTunes started up again, it knew that it needed to still download David Bowie, and did so. I also could check my “account”, to see which pieces I’d bought, and how much I’d been charged so far. So there’s no confusion. (Also, iTunes will “remind” you if you are going to “re-buy” something.)
I’m going to keep checking out the Apple music store, because this is a great idea! And I enjoy listening to the 30 second previews of music. It’s so easy and convenient. I am getting all sorts of ideas about what I want to get next. Also, there are whole albums that are so great, I will simply opt to buy the CD, rather than download.
It’s a great idea, but to me 99 cents a song and $10 a CD is way overpriced for an MP4 file, plus you get no physical CD, no cool artwork and whatever other goodies happened to be included in your physical product. If you find a good sale at Best Buy, or wherever, you can usually find an actual CD in this price range, and most CDs can be had at about $14 from online retailers like CD Now and the such. And if you’re lucky enough to find it used, try $5-$7.
I don’t have any experience with MP4s, but for what good reason would I want to pay $1/song for lossy, compressed music data on a non-physical medium, when I can pay slightly more and get the complete digital file on CD format, with all the goodies. Or if I’m lucky, I can find it for nearly the same price.
I’d be willing to pay maybe $0.50 a song, if not a quarter.
Maybe the others that have already downloaded some music can verify this, but supposedly, you get a digital image of the album artwork when you purchase a song (maybe the whole album?), and iTunes can catalog and display those images.
Even when I was a teenager, the going rate for singles was 75 cents to a dollar (and most of them came in plain sleeves so “cool artwork” wasn’t even a consideration, so I think 99 cents per track is very fair indeed.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a Mac. However, Mrs. Kunilou has one at work, so maybe we can try it out.
I poked around last night and found some stuff I’d like to have. Didn’t buy anything yet. I’ve always hated buying entire albums unless I’d heard at least three songs from it that I like. CD singles are ridiculous for the most part and overpriced and I almost never bought them. Assuming the quality and quantity of offerings stays high (and isn’t limited to the latest releases as new material is added) I can see spending serious buckage here.
Yup. The album artwork appears in the lower left corner of iTunes (there is a button you can click to hide/show the image). Click on the image to see a larger version of it.
The service will be available to windows users in a year or so.
But will it be successful? I dunno. I love Apple stuff, the OS, the hardware and software. But market share tells me that most people don’t love Apple stuff (computer-wise, iPod may be a different story.)
I’m liking the service so far. As has been mentioned, they will need to get a deeper catalog, but I’d be surprised if that weren’t already in the works. I’ve downloaded a few songs, but no albums yet. There are a number of ‘incomplete albums’, which is too bad; some of them are albums I WOULD have downloaded if they were complete. So hopefully that will be worked on, as well.
And Hey you!, as far as it only working with Macs… according to the above quoted newsletter, Apple is expected to ship a version that works with Windows (and internationally, as well) if the Mac version proves successful.
So do I think it’ll work? I dunno. I’d like to think most people are willing to pay for their music, but time will tell. I certainly am, and I do believe most other people are as well. So yes, I am hopeful. This is something the music industry itself should have undertaken years ago… I mean, MP3s were around way before they became the huge thing they are now, and common broadband connections didn’t exactly sneak up on us. Someone, somewhere in the music industry should have thought, “Fast connections? Small, quality music files? We should probably look into this!” Now so many kids are used to getting their music for free, it may be too late for them. Hopefully the many of us who are still willing to pay are enough to make Apple’s system work.
A lot of information about the differences between MP3 and AAC (or mp4 as others have been calling it here) can be found on Apple’s site.
The lowdown:
File size of a 128kbps AAC song = File size of a 128 kbps MP3 song
Quality of a 128kbps AAC song = Quality of a 320kbps MP3 song
Most people cannot distinguish the AAC song from the original uncompressed song.
More information can be found at http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/aac/
And as far as copy protection is concerned for purchased music:
Unlimited burning to CDs (max 10 times per playlist, then playlist must be changed
Unlimited iPods
Can be played on a maximum of 3 “authorized” computers. You can also deauthorize a computer (such as when getting a new computer).
The only thing I haven’t figured out yet concerned the streaming ability of iTunes to other computers on a local network. I heard you might not be able to stream any of your purchased AAC music. MP3s, though, work fine.
