I’ve bought about 50 tracks from the service, and I’m very impressed. Some of the dance music I like isn’t up there, but I hope the selection will expand in that regard. Compared to some… surreptitiously acquired MP3s I had, the replacement M4P files sounds spectacular.
I think $0.99 is a fair price, giving everyone involved a bit of profit, but not gouging the consumer. I really, really hope this thing takes off.
Thanks, Anamorphic.
One more question- When they say you can “burn them to CD” are they talking about only as mp4 format (data CD) or can you convert them to WAV/CDA and burn a standard audio CD? Is there a MP4>WAV codec?
itunes has a “burn cd” button in the top right corner, and burns audio cds of mp4s, as well as, if you go into preferences, you can select data cds if that’s what you want.
also, to the people talking about how .99 seems steep, but at the same time, you do get the cd cover in the lower right corner, and you can get an entire album for $9.99… that might seem like a lot for an album with 8 tracks(say, ‘born to run’ by bruce springsteen, which, incidentally, you can buy track by track for only $8) but think about an album like third eye blind’s first album… i paid like $15 bucks for it in 1997, so it probably runs like $17-18 now… i’ll gladly take no liner notes for a full album for an album that i would rip to my computer anyway, and that i can legally and with a clear conscience burn a copy of for my car… then i can take that extra eight bucks and buy a legal copy of “born to run” 
i think the whole thing is great, and you know that they’re expanding song selection… in fact, there’s actually a link so you can email them bands that you’d like to see them have albums from… that’s pretty damn cool…
reason 1394863 that i love my mac…
Still way too expensive. I use mp3s to preview music I’m thinking about buying or to hear music that is out-of-print or otherwise unavailable. mp3s themselves are not something I’m willing to pay money for, except in a monthly fee/unlimited downloads type arrangement.
Possibly I would participate in a service that charged me to download an mp3, and then applied that charge against the cost of the CD should I decide to buy it. But even for that arrangement, anything more than 50 cents per track is outrageous. You have to at least be competitive with the jukebox at the bowling alley.
P2P and FTP serve my needs beautifully at the moment, and they’re free. Illegal yes, immoral no. I buy more music than anybody I know.
-fh
Has anyone noticed AiMS categorization of the music is a little strange? The New Age genre lists artists like The Carpenters, Mitch Miller and Guy Lombardo.:dubious:
Nothing like relaxing after a hard days work to the Holiday Sing Along with Mitch Miller:confused:
This is a great service for people who like to download individual songs, and it’s way overdue.
I, on the other hand, am an album guy. Even from my P2P of choice, I rarely download less than a full album, just because that’s the way I think about music. Downloading a single song is like downloading fifteen minutes of a two-hour movie to me. (I’m’ not right or wrong; it’s just a quirk.)
IMO, $9.99 is not sufficiently cheaper than the $13-15 I pay for a CD at my local independent record shop to make me switch.
What a service like this needs, for people like me, is a subscription service. Slate had a story about this in which they pointed to eMusic and its failure to take off as a counterexample to the idea that people want to pay a fee for unlimited downloads, but then they went on to explain that eMusic’s catalog is terribly limited. A service with a universal catalog–or even one as broad as iTunes–would be huge.
This is a good step, though. I’m encouraged.
Dr. J
I’ve downloaded the iTunes 4 player, but when I tried to download Quicktime 6.2, somehow I ended up with 6.1. Anybody else notice this? Or know where I went wrong. I’d try it again, but I don’t want to waste another 90 minutes downloading 6.1 again.
I usually buy albums, but there are some songs that I really like but don’t like the albums they are from, so I would definitely buy those songs individually. A dollar is a little high buy I would pay it. Of course I would preview the song first on mp3 before I bought it.
I’ve only played with iTunes 4 and the iTunes Music Store briefly, but the ease of use is mind-blowing – this thing could easily become the next Digital Crack™ if I’m not careful… :eek:
(Lucky for me that the store doesn’t have any “Weird Al” Yankovic stuff yet, or I’d be out lotsa bucks already 
)
It’s kind of difficult to cart the bowling alley jukebox around in my backpack…
I am really not getting the notion that 99 cents is an outrageous price to pay for a song. An average CD has, what, between 10 and 15 songs? With CDs costing more than $15 you’re paying $1 or more per song if you buy the CD, and you’re getting songs that you may not like or want but have no choice but to pay for. As opposed to paying under a dollar (with no tax, I assume) for a song that you know you want and only the songs you know you want.
Well, they’re selling a digital file, so the only cost is the servers & the bandwidth. Seems like they could make a lot of money. If the record co is getting $.69, that’s almost all profit. Apple covers the delivery costs with their share.
Yes. Also, you can get “Clutter”, which is freeware. It will search for and display the album cover if it’s available. It stores the .jpgs in its prefs file.
Regarding market share: Apple has a very low marekt share according to annual sales figures (and it varies according to diff sources). But Mac users tend to hold onto their machines longer. I bought a 7600 in 1996. I finally upgraded last year. So, I contributed to the “market share” in 1996 and 2002, but I was still using a Mac in between. Also, who buys the bulk of PCs? Corporations probably, so macs may have a much higher percentage of home users - and who what this service is aimed at.
Funny aside: I was searching for “Detachable Penis” by King Missle. They didn’t have it, but there were a couple songs with the word in the title. It was spelled “P***s”. But the word is clearly heard in the 30 second sample.
I dont know AAC but I am guessing the quality part cant be right. You probably wanted
Quality of a 128kbps AAC song = Quality of a 192kbps MP3 song
Even Microsoft and the OggVorbis standard with their years of research dont claim 128 of their format = 320 MP3.
I am sure most people cant tell any difference though.
I don’t think Apple is impartial enough to be trusted. That line about being equal to a 320k MP3 is clearly crap.
Not that it matters much (I’ve always been perfectly happy with 128k MP3s) but 128k AAC didn’t do that well in a reasonably scientific test by German magazine c’t. No better than MP3 at low-to-medium bitrates, the test suggests.
(Interesting sidenote - they did another, more rigorous test a while ago, which showed that even hardcore audiophiles couldn’t tell the difference between 256k MP3s and the original CD, and sometimes struggled even at 128k.)
Actually, there was a company some time ago that had MP3s that you could buy for 50-75 cents a pop. (I forget the name of the site… it may have been mp3.com’s precurssor.) However, the music industry shut that site down and it’s taken a good five years or more for the intelligence of that idea to surface again.
In reply to ramesh and SmackFu:
Yeah, quoting Apple about how AAC is so much better than MP3 is a little shady. Though I unfortunately can’t find the link, I do remember looking at what I remember to be a very official/impartial web site a little less than a year ago comparing AAC and MP3. They concluded that AAC 128kbps was as good as if not better than MP3 256kbps.
Personally, I think on MANY songs, AAC sounds great. But on some, it just doesn’t seem to have the punch, even to the point of sounding really bad. At least that’s what I thought when listening to the preview for Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.”
This stuff is definitely digital crack. It’s like Kazaa, but without the guilt of stealing. I’ve bought almost $150 songs in four days. I probably need some sort of rehab. Or a new iPod. Yeah, that’s it. A bigger iPod…
Help.
Heh. I have a lot to say about this whole thing & let me start off with this little tirade to all you “album people” who find steals rummaging through the bargain bin at Costco’s or like hanging out at your local “independent” record store. Bah!
What’s the selection in the bargain bin at Costco or Walmart? Crap, that’s what. Unless you like the surplus top 40 junk from the last several years or stuff that is really, really crap that no one wants. You aren’t going to find cool “obscure” music there. And how much time are you going to spend driving there and rummaging around?
The independent record stores? Hah! I haven’t seen or been in a decent one in years.
Sure, I was like you once. Bought exclusively from independents, mostly import stuff. Very expensive & they usually only had a few copies. It was a race among us few to grab what we could. Then we made copies for the rest of us that didn’t make it to the store on stocking day. Illegal copying? Yeah sure when the store only had three copies to begin with? So sue me.
I don’t listen to top 40. Never have, never will. Not even the top 1400 probably. I’ll never find anything I like at Costco’s or my local independent, even if I had one.
Apple Music Store’s gonna make it much easier for me to find & legally purchase what I want. Right now I’m sitting on my bed. Try that at Costco. Selection’s not great yet but it’s growing everyday. I’d much rather buy a $.99 song I want than a $15 album I don’t. And CD singles are what, about $5 these days? Forget it.
What I’d like to see? Integrate those struggling, beginning artists that are willing to give away music for free. That’ll bring even more people to the site & shut down the current sites already doing it. Apple will do it better.
What I think I just might like the most? Where are the middle men? The accursed distributors that have been raping the music industry & artists all these years? Is Apple finally eliminating those scum? Hurray! I’ll buy & listen to what I want thank you, not what you allow me to.