A week ago I would have said the big music companies were going the way of the slide rule and buggy-whip industry. I didn’t have a good idea of what was going to take its place, but I figured the landscape of the music industry would have been unrecognizable is ten years.
Saved the music business? Hardly. It’s been open one whole week. In that week, it’s served the same amount of tracks that Kazaa probably does in a couple of hours. Most importantly, it’s not even available to the vast majority of the market yet. Right now, it’s the proverbial drop in the bucket.
What iTunes does demonstrate is Apple’s superb PR chops. Reading the fluff about iTunes that’s been published in the last week, you’d think Apple invented the notion of authorized music downloads–never mind that several other services, including eMusic, have been doing this for years.
Let me rephrase that; I know you don’t think people are saying they invented it, but the fact they are the first to make a successful go of it (for at least a week) shows that it’s possible to make money from this model. That alone is a surprise to me, that they can successfully complete with “free”.
Ah, I see. Because you can get water for free, why should you pay? People who do are obviously suckers.
One problem with the analogy, though: last I checked, rain clouds don’t need to get paid for their work; it doesn’t cost them money to create rain; they don’t need to pay for rent and food and living expenses and everything else you need to survive. Musicians do, you see.
But did they make a successful go of it? Were all those downloads at full price? How much did Apple pay for the rights? Most importantly, how many of the users who bought in the last week will be back next week, or next month, or next year?
One swallow does not a summer make, and it takes more than one good week to save the music industry.
The belief (as I understand it) is that once the service becomes available for Windows owners (settle down and wait, kids), a comparable number of Windows users will also prefer to buy their music legitimately. It won’t stop P2P trading, but it will return some revenue back to the musicians and the labels that they won’t automatically shun electronic distribution.
And the Macheads I’ve talked to who’ve tried the service generally give it a thumbs-up. it’s not musical nirvana yet, but it is awfully convenient and reasonably priced.
(I’ve only spent $5 so far, but will spend more if and when I find more stuff I want)
The argument about the 128 kbps bitrate is comparable to the argument about MgHz. Higher bitrate does not necessarily equal higher quality since it is delivered in a different format. AAC is a non-proprietary format developed by Dolby. I have heard claims that a 128 kbps bitrate in AAC is approximately equal to an mp3 format of twice that, but I do not claim to have made that judgment for myself. I 0nly wanted to point out that a different format requires a different scale to measure quality. I don’t think that anybody would argue that sound quality can be reduced to a single number.
I do hope that this post doesn’t develop into another Mac vs. PC thing, because I would really like to find out how it compares to other legal download methods. I personally have spent 17$ at the music store and am proabably through with it for a while. The music selection is still pretty small, but I am hoping that it will grow. I havent noticed any difference in the sound quality, and the system is very easy to use. It’s nice to see the album covers and links to the bands websites as well. I don’t have any major complaints about the system yet, but I have only been using it for a week.
A higher bitrate isn’t necessarily better even for the same format. A 128 kbps MP3 made with LAME may sound as good as a 160 kbps MP3 made with Xing’s encoder.
I’m not hip to the details of the AAC format, though. Do you need to use proprietary software to burn the tracks to CD or copy them to a different computer?
I think at this point, the availability of MP3 playing devices is a pretty big point in MP3’s favor. I don’t think I’d pay to download songs I could only listen to on my computer, or had to burn to CD and re-rip to use in other devices.
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. I’ve been saying for years (okay, at least 2 years) that if they would just come out with a service that let you download per song for around a dollar, and actually had music people wanted to download instead of just the obscure semi-complete libraries of emusic and mp3.com, it’d be exactly what I needed. Now it just needs to come out for Windows and I’ll be set.
Wumpus said it was just a success for Apple’s PR. Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point. It’s not like there was a need for a huge technological breakthrough; the technology has been there for years. What was needed was a third party to come in, one with significant weight that it could mediate between the Evil Record Companies and the Freedom-Fighting Consumers. (And it doesn’t hurt that Apple knows a lot about user interfaces – all the reviews I’ve read about the service says that the iTunes interface does everything exactly right).
I think people underestimate the role of PR and promotion and all that. I’m no fan of the RIAA by any means, but I won’t say that they’re useless. For example: Pink. I don’t listen to the radio, and I’m not a particular fan of that genre of music. There’s no reason for me to know who Pink is or recognize any of her songs, and yet I do. (And I’ve been inclined to get a copy of “I’m Coming Up,” if only I could get it without buying the entire album.) I don’t know how I do; I can only assume that it’s the thousands if not millions of dollars of promotional money at work.
iTunes is not going to stop music piracy, obviously. People are always going to try to get stuff for free, and people are always going to find ways to rationalize it to help themselves believe they’re not doing anything ethically or morally wrong by stealing music. What the industry has needed to do was give those of us willing to pay for what we get, the chance to do it as conveniently as the the p2p services.
Well, another thing is that Apple wasn’t able to get a lot of the huge acts, including The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen to sign on, so they are missing quite a lot of good music.
True, but that’s just the launch, in theory. They’re already working on adding many more artists (including working with independent labels), and I have no doubt that once currently missing artists see how well it works, they’ll have no problem signing up.
As far as iTunes ‘saving the music industry’… well, that’s probably overstating things, but they’ve certainly made a huge step in the right direction. It’s way too early to tell if it’ll be successful, but I’m hopeful. I’ve only spent $12 so far, but I’ll spend lots more once they add more independent label artists to the mix.
How is the Mac file-sharing community then? Do they have access to decent clients for getting all these ‘highly illegal files’ which are ‘supposedly’ reducing the music industries ability to buy fleets of Mercedes and sacks of Cocaine?
I know for a fact you can’t get a decent Soulseek client - which would make me cry buckets frankly
To truly measure it’s ‘success’ you need to
a) wait a month or 2 - it’s ‘news’ at the moment - wait til it isn’t.
b) wait til it’s available to the other 85% of the market
If it is successful - then at least it will deflect some flak away from the Internet as ‘evil network’ for a while
Yes, and you get what you pay for. Incorrect song titles, titles attributed to the wrong artist, varying and poor sound quality, occasional background noise, etc.
I’d rather pay a reasonable price for some quality assurance.
Well, for 99 cents a pop, I’d rather buy the CD and rip my own MP3s. It’ll end up being about the same price for the typical CD, and the quality of my MP3s will be much higher. Plus apparently iTunes doesn’t carry any tracks over 6 minutes, and I wouldn’t have to worry about that little restriction.
The challenge (not just for iTunes but for all these services) is finding a pricing structure that makes downloading the legit version more attractive to a large number of people than either downloading a pirate copy or buying the real CD.
I don’t happen to think that a flat 99 cents a song is the proper pricing structure–the vast majority of album tracks will never be downloaded at that price–but only time will tell.
I would use the service IF it allows me to d/l just one song at a time (which it apparently does). I’ve always hated paying $12-18 for a CD with a bunch of crap songs to get the 2 or 3 that I want.
IMHO,Itunes is a step in the right direction. The longer the record industry ignores or tries to buck the trend of Internet music availability, the more it risks obsolesence.
My personal objections to the current itunes concept are:
[ol][li]It only works for Macs, an estimated 5% of the computing bunch[/li][li]A song costs US$.99, WAY too much[/li][li]There are still some restrictions on the use of the downloads (can’t be copied to more than X number of machines, etc.)[/li][li]The most common file format, MP3, is not used[/li][li]Only a limited number of titles is available[/ol][/li]However, note that all these objections may not exist in the near future, to wit:[ol][li]PC’s are scheduled to be added to the system[/li][li]Song prices may go down[/li][li]The restrictions may be lifted and are easily defeated anyway[/li][li]Any file format can be converted to any other with a little extra work[/li][li]More titles are sure to be added if the concept takes off[/ol][/li]Itunes reminds me of Janis Ian’s challenge to record companies about a year ago. She proposed that:
Janis felt that this would stimulate sales, as well as making fans happy; putting her songs where her mouth was, she found exactly that happened when she offered catalog material of her own on her web site.
And her suggested price was 25 cents per song, an amount she calculated would enrich the suppliers beyond their wildest dreams, but present near-zero obstacles to those (like me) that say $1 is too expensive!
(The Ian article cited above is actually a followup to her earlier article about Internet music sharing, and worth the read.)
