Billboard is the latest to report on Apple’s digital music service, today posting an article that further describes the service. According to Billboard, the service is an “a la carte” download store that is built into iTunes. No subscription will be required for the service, and tracks will retail for an average of 99 cents. Once purchased, songs are automatically transferred to your iTunes library and synched to an iPod (if available). The content can also be burned to CD. Read more here, here and here.
Billboard Offers Details on Apple’s Digital Music Service
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However I doubt this service would go far because of several reasons.
– If it is Mac-only, they risk alienating most iPod users as well as a huge potential market. Most music lovers are youth, most youth are PC users, thus Mac-only doesn’t sound too feasible. Remember, this should not be an accessory to the Mac, rather it should be the other way around if they want the $$$.
Perhaps integration with Music Match. Personally, I would probably start using the service if it available for other stuff especially WMP and RealOne. Limiting theirself to a tool used by a shrinking minority of users isn’t the brightest thing I heard. Perhaps a port of iTunes would do some good for the service (may not be for the Mac, but hey! nobody bought the mac because solely of iTunes).
– The biggest market for this is youth. Most youth DON’T have credit cards. In other words, though matter how brain-dead simple the process is in addition to how convienient it is, this wouldn’t pull a lot of users from Kazaa and CD buying.
– In addition to that, on Kazaa downloading it free (like many people care whether it is illegal or not anyway) and in most CD shops, they can listen to the songs before buying the CDs (in Malaysia at least). In other words, they can test out the song before they buy. For this service, most likely “you buy, you keep” kinda service. In other words, if you got the latest song from Madonna and absolutely hate it, you just lost a buck.
What would be nice is that immediately after download, you can test the song to see whether you want to keep it or leave it.
– How much CDs would they allow us to burn without getting RIAA mad? Well, it matters little, after burning the CD, duplicate it. But then again, that would make it illegal as well as complicated. Oh, whatever.
But anyway $.99 is kinda good price for impulse buying. But that only happens if you are listening to it, really like it and click on “Buy”. How can that happen? Internet radio. Just say I was listening to a radio channel on Italian Opera and really like the latest song by Pavarotti, I just click on buy without think about it, and then I can burn on my CDs or sync with my (imaginary) iPod.
Provided that the selection is good, this service should take off like a shot. You can bet your ass Apple’s going to offer this to windows users (Broader customer base), and I have this funny feeling that a linux port won’t be far behind that. (I have no facts to back that up; however, once it’s proven that this is a profitable business paradigm, Apple will want to reach every possible market. It’s just good business sense, and the cost to port from OS X to linux would be minimal, IMHO.)
This will prove to be the cheapest (For the customer), most cost-effective (For the record industry), simplest to manage (Cut out the middlemen) method of distributing music in the history of the record industry. I feel it in my bones.
(I have no facts to back that up; however, once it’s proven that this is a profitable business paradigm, Apple will want to reach every possible market. It’s just good business sense, and the cost to port from OS X to linux would be minimal, IMHO.)
Most Linux users are either those working at companies (e.g. corporate desktops), or plain ol’ geeks. And the prior aren’t all that interested in buying MP3s (at least most employers won’t), and the latter’s interest in paying money with songs? Puh-leze.
And just because both OS X and Linux uses UNIX it doesn’t mean that porting would be trivial. The biggest issue is that other than GNUStep, there is no Cocoa on Linux. Plus, they can’t be using GNUStep and risk alienating GNOME and KDE users (GNUStep apps tend to have a very different [read: NeXT-like] UI in comparing with KDE and GNOME’s Windows’ like UI).
So minimal? No. Easier than porting to Windows? Yes. Would that make any difference? Nope. Why not? How much profit can Apple make from Linux’s almost nonexisting consumer market in the first place?
…they can test out the song before they buy
I think LQ preview streams can be expected.
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…after burning the CD, duplicate it. But then again, that would make it illegal as well as complicated.
Would it? In most countries, you can legally make any number of copies for personal use and even give a reasonable number of copies to friends.
Dude. If you think for one second that somewhere, deep in the bowels of Apple’s R&D department, there isn’t a linux box that supports Cocoa, you’ve got a surprise coming. It doesn’t have to be open-source; people will use it anyway. I help run my local LUG, and I can tell you right now, almost every member would jump at the chance to run this on linux.
As for Linux’s “Almost non-exsistant” consumer marketplace? Let me tell you something. P2p filetrading on linux, frankly, sucks. Those people who use linux at work more than likely use it at home too. If Apple doesn’t already have both windows and linux versions of this, they will soon. At $0.99 a track, with all the rights you get from buying the track on CD, I think most non-teenage linux users would hop right on to it. Desktop linux _IS_ gaining marketshare; Apple would be foolish not to take advantage of that fact. Besides, Apple’s profits have always been in the hardware. Those iTunes-on-linux guys would still want an iPod. Hell, I have two. I love them to death.
Desktop linux _IS_ gaining marketshare; Apple would be foolish not to take advantage of that fact. Besides, Apple’s profits have always been in the hardware.
This music-download-service is pretty dangerous. It’s risky. There are no successfull music-download-services at the moment. What Apple is going to announce may fail, or may succeed. I think it would be pretty stupid if Apple would invest in an infrastructure that would also support Windows and Linux users.
Begin with mac-only. It’s true that that doesn’t maximise their profit, but it reduces the loss if the service would fail. In the mean time, they may get some extra switchers. If the service proves to be successfull, then they should port it to windows users too. And when Linux is also a significant home-desktop player, then they might port it to linux too.
Didn’t the ipod start out as mac-only? Only when it proved to be a success, they ported it to windows. I expect the same to happen here.
99 cents per track doesn’t seem such a good deal to me, you can buy CDs mail order for less. I suppose it’s faster and more convenient to download the MP3s. But personally I’d much rather wait a few days to get a CD with cover art, liner notes and higher sound quality. Will people really pay for MP3s when they can download them for free?
port itunes to windows…let them have a taste of some decent software other than that game that valve created a few years back…you know with that scientist guy.
Why let a third party take first place on the windows platform. If itunes is on windows it’ll be far more popular and “official” plus software sales might be better for Apple. Unless its bundled with the service or any new ipods that are released.
The only thing I would pay for online is a .WAV file. I know the bandwidth would be a killer, but the sound quality would be too. A compressed sound file burned to CD will not have audio quality enough to be played on a component stereo system and be listened to by anybody who has halfway decent ears.
BTW, who on this forum believes that an MP3/OFF/whatever is an EXACT copy of a CD file? lol…
Just because they say it will the service will plug into iTunes doesn’t mean its the same iTunes thats out now – iTunes 3.0. For all you know they could release iTunes 4 with the service which just so happens to support AC-3, Mpeg 4, Ogg or whatever they feel like.
Also why does everyone assume its going to be low quality? MP3 != low quality. Yes MP3 at 192kbs = low quality but there is nothing in the MP3 format that dictates that it “has” to be a lossy format.
I would only pay for downloaded music only if it is the same quality as the CD , it means in a non-lossy format like FLAC.
Okay, average cost of a CD – $13 US. How many songs come on a CD? 10? 12? 14? @ a $1 a song, how is this really saving me anything to get excited about? This is pure crap from the record companies! They don’t have to burn a cd, buy a case, print the paper for the book in the front, package it, ship it, or anything. They just post it on a server they already have, and their going to charge us (practically) the same!
Bull shit! If this service charge $0.15, or $0.25 a song, I might be interested. It is kind of a pain to go through the shananagins on Kaza to get a good quaility song. I’d glady drop $5 a month on some music, which is more than they get from me now. But not for 5 songs. Give me two CDs worth of music for $5, and we’re talking.
When is the RIAA going to wakeup and realize that they can’t continue to reap these gigantic profits that they are making now?
On a related note, everyone should probably read this story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33972-2003Apr24.html
In a nutshell, the RIAA is demanding that Verizon turn over the names of two people who were associated with two ips which were engaged in illegal file sharing. Verizon refused, saying that the RIAA does not have the authority to make that depand (backed by a subpoena), cause they never went before a judge. The RIAA claims that the DCMA “…gives movie studios, record companies, software makers and other copyright owners the right to subpoena Internet service providers without getting a judge’s approval.”
When did the RIAA become sheriff?
It’s true. I would prefer something around 67 cents per song. Heck, I would LIKE it to be lower. They should have a 30 second preview at 24kbps or something for each song. Hmm, ability to buy the covers etc. later?
You are dreaming if you think you will get 2 CD’s for $5. Remember they already charge 3 times that much for the CD on the shelf, taking your idea into account, i should be able to download 6 CD’s! Never work.
You also assume people want FULL ALBUMS. I’m in favour of this service but i’m only going to get the songs here and there. Example, a friend just lent me the new Foo Fighters Album to listen to (i do like them) and while i think One by One is a good album, i’m only interested in one song, thats the song i’ll gladly pay a dollar for at a good AAC or MP3 audio rate 160kbps or higher. I’m not interested in the hard copy or art work, it can just sit there in my collection. Just like loads of other songs i would want but wouldn’t buy on CD. However…with my favourite bands i’ll still buy the CD but instead look for live stuff or b-sides on the music service. Its different with the stuff you love and the stuff you like.
The comparisons to CD prices aren’t particularly valid. One of the most common rants I see against the music industry is that they put crap tracks on discs so that they can charge more. This means that the people buying the discs aren’t interested in all of the tracks, but only, say, the 4 best ones. So with this service you could pay $4 for the songs you actually want, or for $13 you could buy the songs you actually want, plus some extras you don’t necessarily care about. Somehow I don’t see that the more than 3x price increase is worth it for some crappy extra tracks you don’t want.
I don’t have a problem with musicians and record companies making a profit, talented people put in a lot of hard work and time in order to bring us listening pleasure (note that only a very small percentage of working musicians, even fairly famous ones, are raking it in, most are making a living if they’re lucky).
But when record companies bring out a service which reduces their costs considerably (distribution, manufacturing, storage, retailer margin etc.) and results in a lower quality end product (compressed audio, no nice printed cd and jewel case), charge almost the same price and expect everyone to love them for it, I get pissed off at how short sighted they are.
On the other hand some potential punters go too far the other way, expecting the world for 10 bucks.
A dollar a track is in my opinion too much. Not only is it so similar to physical CDs bought by discount mailorder that you might as well get the real thing, but it’s also well over the “might as well” threshold.
At a dollar a track I will think very carefully about whether I want that track, because apart from anything else, if I REALLY want it, then there’s a good chance that I’ll want others off the same album, and if that’s the case I might as well buy the CD. If I don’t REALLY want it, then I’ll probably give it a miss.
But at 50 cents, I’m much more likely to get the track on a whim, maybe I like other stuff by the band, maybe I’ve heard good things about them, maybe their homepage looks cool, maybe I’m just reminising about my youth and that track reminds me of it, hell it’s only 50 cents!
For me, 50 cents is probably my “might as well” threshold, and the result would probably be that I’d buy WAY more than twice the number of tracks I would at a dollar.
That’s what gets me about this sort of pricing, not only is it greedy, but in my opinion it’s stupidly greedy, because it actually makes them less money!
i think the point here is that service might be able to cut back on some of the pirating that is going on. 99 cents is not that much money so a certain percentages (granted not 100% and probably not 50%) of illegal file swappers might let the conscience nag them sufficiently to do this rather than outright steal tracks.
Now regarding the music industry. It sucks. Web-based independent music is the only salvation. Today there are 3 or 4 major record companies. They control distribution to retail and retail is controled by a small number of hands. lastly clear channel and a few other control too many radio stations. So much control and so much risk reduction equates into crappy music. To blame. M-TV and FCC, partly at least. Videos made promoting an album absurdly expensive. The FCC removal of a cap on radio ownership sealed the deal.
the internet is the only way out of this.
99 cents is a fair price. I read these posts how people don’t value anything unless its 24 cents. Thats just funny. Get a better job or continue to steal.
Artists need to make money too. Music equipment, and creativity doesn’t cost 10 cents.
I can see how the record labels would be interested, the alternative is their music gets pirated. A new version for iTunes for Mac is a given and I am sure that Apple has plans for a Windows version.
A lot of Apple’s ideas have seemed crazy initially like the iMac, iPod, iApps. Many were flops Newton. Some products were in the wrong place at the wrong time like the Cube. This is nothing new and will come to pass as another thing that Apple has done that their competitors don’t do or is copied.
99 cents may be a fair price for the music, but the point is that it’s more than a lot of CDs cost online. If you want the whole CD rather than just a couple of songs, why would anyone chose MP3s over a CD if there isn’t a significant difference in price?
It seems like bad business to sell them for a similar price to the CD, when obviously it costs them a lot less to sell them as MP3s without the actual CD and packaging.
How is $1 a track a fair price? CDs are much cheaper to make than, say, cassette tapes. When CDs became popular, they where around $12, while cassettes were around $8. The reason for the price difference? We’ll, CD making is a new technology, and you pay a premium for that tech. Now, its old had. The prices should have dropped. But the industry had us shoppers trained! You pay $12 for a CD. Thats all there is too it.
And my original post should have said 4 albums-worth-of-music, not 4 albums. You’re right, we do get alot of crap songs when we buy a whole album. But that still dosen’t make it right to charge an equitable amount for a song just because I’m not getting the crap songs.
And I don’t buy this ‘stealing from the artist’ bs. The record industry has been stealing from the artists for years! Where is the outrage, there?
What would be a fair price?
It may seem unfair to us but the fee Apple charges has to be acceptable to the record labels, artists and Apple. Thats a lot of people and entities.
The cost of the media is not the issue. Lets stop thinking that CDs cost 10 cents and we should pay 1 cents per song because that is the cost of the media.
If buying a CD is cheaper, then buy the CD. If stealing is cheaper then do so. If 99 cents from Apple is too much money then don’t download from Apple.
If the service proves to be successfull, then they should port it to windows users too. And when Linux is also a significant home-desktop player, then they might port it to linux too.
No, I say keep it as Mac-only. Assuming this takes off, if Apple keeps coming out with this neat stuff and then makes it available to PC users, most people are going to keep using PCs. Of course, Mac pundets will never understand that the ‘elegance’ of OSX isn’t going to win many people over, but products/services like this might.
99 cents per track doesn’t seem such a good deal to me, you can buy CDs mail order for less.
As some have already pointed out, I’d much rather go this route than pay for a CD with 2-3 good songs on it. Hell, if this really takes off, it’ll actually force artists to make quality CDs instead of 1-2 good songs and 8-10 crap songs that serve as filler. For those of you who have a lot of CDs, go through your collection and count the ones where you liked EVERY song on the CD. Hell, how many of them do you have where you actually liked HALF the songs on the CD? If you could just grab the songs you like and screw the rest, this will probably save you money in the long run. And the RIAA knows that most people aren’t going to buy entire CDs using this service. If that were true, I think the price of each track would be lower.
Will people really pay for MP3s when they can download them for free?
Most people probably won’t, but some will.
MusicMatch is crap
Agreed – screw Musicmatch.
If itunes is on windows it’ll be far more popular and “official” plus software sales might be better for Apple.
Blech. I’ll take a Winamp + Nero combo over iTunes any day of the week.
BTW, who on this forum believes that an MP3/OFF/whatever is an EXACT copy of a CD file? lol…
Well, unless you have a nice stereo system to listen to it on (I don’t), 192k and CD audio sound about the same.
BTW: Anybody who insists on getting CD covers and liner notes are little more than corporate whores
“It may seem unfair to us but the fee Apple charges has to be acceptable to the record labels, artists and Apple. Thats a lot of people and entities.”
Of course it has to be acceptable to all stakeholders. I think the major point here is that what’s acceptable to recording industry stakeholders and what’s acceptable to the consumer are two very different things.
Whether $0.99 per song is acceptable to recording industry stakeholders is irrelevant because it’s very likely that it will not be acceptable to consumers who are rapidly becoming accustomed to paying nothing.
The recording industry has to even more rapidly evaluate it’s business model. Online distribution, which may eventually reduce operating costs, is a step in the right direction. It most also be very scary to them.
The industry developed because of the cost of recording technology and the complexity of distribution. Now technology is obliterating these barriers to entry. The cost of recording technology has decreased. All that remains is the industry’s stranglehold on traditional radio and retail distribution. Internet radio and online distribution will change that.
Someone else said that musicians will always make money. They’ve been making money for centuries, long before the recording industry existed. I like to believe the music industry will always make money, but the recording industry’s days are numbered.
I’m OT.
“For those of you who have a lot of CDs, go through your collection and count the ones where you liked EVERY song on the CD. Hell, how many of them do you have where you actually liked HALF the songs on the CD?”
Most albums have one or two tracks that I don’t care for much, but I’d say that I like the majority of tracks on 99% of the 500+ albums I own. Actually there are only a handfull of albums where I skip tracks every time I play the CD and they are mainly compilations or live albums.
“If you could just grab the songs you like and screw the rest, this will probably save you money in the long run.”
But how do you know which songs you like before you actually buy the CD and listen to it at least a few times? There may be samples available, but they tend to be very low quality and don’t show you how important the track is to the the flow of the album. Also, I often find that tracks I dislike the first time I hear them are among my favourites after a few more listens.
Overall I think I’ll be sticking with CDs and filesharing for music I can’t buy.
If people did only just download the decent songs and not buy the filler ones it might make the artists or songwriters think about this and not release an album year after year, but sit back and actually produce something that takes a while and is made of quality and meaning in the songs, because of this, manufactured bands wouldn’t have a long shelf life.
seriously people, let’s be honest, you can’t compete with free. this service will bomb on the windows platform.
JK — wow, you sound like you listen to music the same way I do. I’m perhaps a touch pickier, though. It’s really hard to tell how common it is to like the majority of songs on an album, though. Some portion of my friends and a lot of the posters on message boards like this one seem all too fond of skipping a large portion of the songs on a given album.
I think we have to define “quality” music here. Writing a “hit” song is not that easy (particularly if you want ones that are cool vs. brittany type of garbage). Writing good songs that have integrity but are not necessarily “hits” is a different matter. Filling up the albums with utter cr*p is yet another.
for Apple to have a nice business selling music online, doesnt mean it has to capture 100% of the online music market. please. obviously the freeloaders that go on kazaa will never pay, not even 1 cent for song. Apple is aiming for a different market. The same market that buys apple’s hardware, even though it;s known not to be as fast, but still value convenience and design and looks into their buying decision.
Noone is forcing you to buy the songs, it;s there, if you want to use it, use it. if you rather buy a cd at your local store or mail catalog,, do it. whatever brings you more value. Some people buy food at walmart while some people choose to buy at more expensive supermarkets that offer a neater shopping enviroment.
it;s funny that so many of you hate Microsoft for being a monopoly, yet condemn Apple for not being one.
These comments are about par for the course when it comes to selling music online.
Firstly, everything here is still technically a rumour considering that the service hasn’t been launched yet.
Secondly, it’s true that it costs less to distribute over the Internet. The price could probably be less than US$0.99, but could it be as low as US$0.50? Everyone in the process takes a cut of the money that covers their costs (of which there are some) and makes a bit of profit out of it. Without going through the economics, do we know the minimum viable price for a service such as this?
Suggesting that the prices should be drastically lower, or that thanks to P2P music no longer has any real money value, are suggestions that do not reflect the realities of the world. In fact, the money side of it has gone a bit overboard, in that artists have to essentially be ‘business ventures’ and earn money, lest they get something for nothing (ie. through pure talent). The recording industry isn’t about to give up without a fight, and they have a lot of copyrights to help back them up.
Due to the efforts of this service, we may get something halfway reasonable that is not an ‘overreaction’ to the ability of users to swap audio files quickly and anonymously, as other services have been.
to me it’s too little too late. and it’s not a bash against Apple, i’d be saying this who ever offered it. since i like old music better than the new music, i’ve basically gotten all the music that i like. i really couldn’t find it in stores anyway and i doubt they are going to be putting alot of the older music on any pay service, such as the 1 hit wonders. i don’t really like much of the new songs, maybe 1 or2 songs here and there, but IMO, it’s a matter of content offering to.
yes for $15 you can make a custom cd how you want, but for $15 i can get 50 blanks and make 50 cds. at least with pirated movies there is still a good reason for me to buy the dvd.
in most cases the dvd is still better quality than the rip, and the dvds have content like behind the scenes, trailers, etc…so if you really liked the movie, the dvd would be a good purchase. as good as divx is, it still doesn’t play in dvd players in large numbers so that’s another thing in favor of actually buying the movie. plus dvds and movies in general have gone down alot in price, i haven’t seen this trend too much on the music side. with the music cds, the only thing they offer is audio, there’s nothing to hold over the pirated version. i think they need to make a quicker transition to dvd audio, or SACD (whatever sony’s format is) so they can claim better sound quality, 5.1 surrond sound etc. they need to have a mix of music and video. if i really REALLY like a song or album, i’d be interested in seeing how they made it, a behind the music type special, concerts, just basically extra content (mostly video) that would make the cd worth the purchase. as you can see i’m more of a visual person and not audio, i enjoy seeing the music video of a song better than just hearing it.
yes all this would cost money, but god forbid you have to spend money to make money.
“Secondly, it’s true that it costs less to distribute over the Internet. The price could probably be less than US$0.99, but could it be as low as US$0.50? Everyone in the process takes a cut of the money that covers their costs (of which there are some) and makes a bit of profit out of it. Without going through the economics, do we know the minimum viable price for a service such as this? ”
Well my life and my living are kindof on the fringes of the music business (I’m an amateur musician, but also I make money from musicians, producers etc. rather than making it from music), so I’ve got some idea of what goes on.
By far the largest part of the retail price of a CD goes to the retailer, because he has to cover the expenses of running a shop, heating, lighting, staff, displays, rent and or rates, and so on. Most of that is eliminated when you do downloads. At the music company end you’ve got somewhere between 50 cents and maybe 2 dollars a cd to cover manufacture, printing, and so on (most will be less than a dollar, 2 bucks would be a nice chunky presentation box), and then there’s the costs of storage, shipping, sorting and so on… once again removed with downloads.
So the 50 cents a track should be doable… especially on back catalogue, the latest and greatest everyone wants right now, and there are major upfront costs to recoup, maybe 99 cents is right for that, but there is a huge catalogue of tracks out there that people would buy if the price was right. I rarely buy full price CDs unless I really want that album (in the UK they’re particularly offensively priced), but when there’s a sale on (usually 3 for 12 pounds or 2 for 10 or something like that) I’ll often buy a dozen, and normally they will be about half things I know I like, and half stuff I’ll take a chance on. Downloads have the potential to attract a huge amount of this sort of impulse buying, but only if the price is right.
Note that apart from the cost of bandwidth, almost everything in downloads is fixed, one off costs, so selling 100 tracks at 50 cents brings in almost as much as selling 50 tracks at a dollar… and personally I think that they’d sell more than double… to me they would anyway.
On the other hand if they were selling at 25 cents they wouldn’t sell me twice as many as at 50 cents, so there’s no point in going too cheap. Maybe the average Impulse buy price is higher than 50 cents, maybe its less, but whatever it happens to be, to maximise profits and minimize piracy, that’s what they need to find.
“Suggesting that the prices should be drastically lower, or that thanks to P2P music no longer has any real money value, are suggestions that do not reflect the realities of the world. ”
Well I certainly DO think that music has real money value, I get tired of people who claim it doesn’t. It’s strange, people have little problem with the concept of paying a chef for his time and skill preparing a fine meal which they gain pleasure from eating, or a decorator for his time and skill painting their house which they gain pleasure from looking at, but when musicians, producers, engineers, managers, and everyone else involved puts in months of work and talent to produce something which brings them pleasure to listen to… suddenly that’s not worth anything?
And them there’s the people who say that they think music should be free, but people will pay for added value with booklets, artwork etc. Yes that stuff is nice, and I think that it’s only fair to give someone a quality product. But it really is rather insulting to the artists to say “Well the year and all the money you spent writing rehearsing and recording the music I’m going to enjoy listening to again and again is worthless, but if you hire a graphic artist for a week to do a nice booklet, I’ll pay for that”
To use this service properly you need all the following:
A Mac with a CD burner, broadband, a credit card, a desire to buy downloaded compressed music and a iPod. The realistic maximum potential market is at best a million consumers and a maybe a $5 million a month in gross revenue and most likely far less. These figures are probably wildly optimistic and 10-20 times the real use that will occur.
Marketers are always optimists. Draw a Venn diagram and you will see how tiny the real market for this service is. A realistic estimate is as little as 50,000 buyers and $150,000 a month revenue.
This is potentially just one service out of many, just as you have many retailers for CDs. Mac users would go to this service because it integrates well with their Mac and Itunes and makes their life easy. In return for this service Apple make their margin.
Users of other systems, or even Mac users who prefer an alternate to Itunes would go to a different retailer that better caters to them, that retailer would make their margin.
I was thinking about the market as a whole and record company pricing policies when I wrote my previous comments and not Apple’s service in isolation.
For example EMI have recently made an announcement, with even higher prices being talked about.
Would it? In most countries, you can legally make any number of copies for personal use and even give a reasonable number of copies to friends.
However America is the biggest market for these kind of stuff, and also Apple cannot advertise this because it is in America.
KCardoza: If you think for one second that somewhere, deep in the bowels of Apple’s R&D department, there isn’t a linux box that supports Cocoa, you’ve got a surprise coming.
Tell me, why exactly would Apple need to have a port of Cocoa to Linux? They don’t need it now, and probably won’t need it in the forseable future. If Darwin breaks down, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD is far more business-friendly than Linux (think license)…
Besides, having a easy port isn’t the big thing right now – it is how to make money and how to distribute it.
KCardoza: I help run my local LUG, and I can tell you right now, almost every member would jump at the chance to run this on linux.
How many people are in your LUG? Now compare that with other consumers NOT using Linux. Dude, the Amiga community would jump and get this service too – would that make it economically feasible? What about the Be community? Or the OS/2 one?
KCardoza: P2p filetrading on linux, frankly, sucks
And the reason being….? Most P2P users on linux aren’t “consumers” – they are geeks. So just like it is completely stupid for Kazaa to port their software to Linux – even though it is completely brain dead simple (with Wine).
KCardoza: Desktop linux _IS_ gaining marketshare; Apple would be foolish not to take advantage of that fact.
Yes, Linux is getting desktop market share. However, most of these come from the workplace. And International market share, it normally come from third world country that probably wouldn’t consider buying music (how many yuans or rupees for a song?)
It’s true that that doesn’t maximise their profit, but it reduces the loss if the service would fail.
Actually, how much lost can you save from being mac-only. Bandwidth? If people buy music, they already paying for the bandwidth. Someone to write Windows clients? Woooooowwwww, that is sooooooooooo expensive. So if they fail, they fail as bad as they would being mac-only. if they succeed, it would spare them the time to compete harder with copy-cats on the PC world and would bring much needed profit into Apple.
Didn’t the ipod start out as mac-only? Only when it proved to be a success, they ported it to windows.
Before iPod, MP3 players were already successful. You can see them in stores, see them given as gifts. In other words, Apple wasn’t entering a barren terrain then. Meanwhile, iPod is an hardware, meant to help sell Macs.
By comparison, the market Apple is entering now is companies with unprofitablity, unsuccess, user backslash, etc. In addition to that, they sell music in a way that would prevent impuls buying (subscription) and music expires after some time.
JK: But personally I’d much rather wait a few days to get a CD with cover art, liner notes and higher sound quality.
Of course, I wonder where you heard that Apple was gonna use MP3, cause I mean, if that’s the case, they are really stupid. After months of promoting AAC, they use MP3?
They don’t have to burn a cd, buy a case, print the paper for the book in the front, package it, ship it, or anything.
And on the Internet, everything is free? Whatever happen to things like bandwidth costs… Besides, a buck for a song is quite worth it. How many actually like all the songs on the CD? Who knows, maybe Apple would give a discount if you are willing to download the whole CD..
Darius: They don’t have to burn a cd, buy a case, print the paper for the book in the front, package it, ship it, or anything.
I would too. But then I would take RealOne over that combo any day (I much prefer RealOne’s UI over Winamp, and since it can burn CDs reasonably well, what’s the fuss?)
CrackedButter: but sit back and actually produce something that takes a while and is made of quality and meaning in the songs
Most artist just buy some song from a writer, practice for some time, make sure their style is in it, and viola – a filler song. There is very little artists that write their own songs. Even less for artists doing their second or third album.
Anonymous: seriously people, let’s be honest, you can’t compete with free. this service will bomb on the windows platform.
Do you know how complicated downloading off Kazaa is for users? Not to mention varriable speeds that either is super fast or super slow, and unknown quality? For example, if I search for Somewhere I Belong by Linkin Park, I get 35 results. And they all varry. Some are 2mbs, others 8mb – which to download?
Like it or not, due to the nature of P2P, it would be never as easy as a la carte services can be.
The recording industry is suffering because the barriers to entry in music production are now trivial.
A technically competent musician with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment can produce and sell their own professional quality music online. The cost of equipment is falling continuously and production technology is becoming easier to use. Competent web page designers are cheap and abundant.
Record companies are tied to promoting a few very highly paid performers and need to sell millions of albums by each artist to make money. A solo artist producing and selling his own music needs only to sell a few thousand copies to make a profit.
The record industry needs to look back to the 16th century for a taste of the future. The invention of moveable type allowed information to be rapidly disseminated. The religious and civil authorities were unable to control information because books and pamphlets could be mass produced.
The ease of copying music means that piracy is impossible to control.
Books are not copied readily because it is impractical and expensive to make a duplicate of a bound book.
DVD piracy will be rampant within 2-3 years as DVD burners become cheaper and faster.
Had photocopiers been available 100 years ago sheet music would have been widely pirated.
Piracy only ends when it is no longer worth the cost and effort. That probably means that songs sold online cost no more than $0.10-$0.20 each and can be purchased without credit cards. A teenager with a broadband connection (provided by his parents) would rather spend hours searching for free music than paying for it because he is time-rich and cash-poor.
“Anonymous: seriously people, let’s be honest, you can’t compete with free. this service will bomb on the windows platform.
Do you know how complicated downloading off Kazaa is for users? Not to mention varriable speeds that either is super fast or super slow, and unknown quality? For example, if I search for Somewhere I Belong by Linkin Park, I get 35 results. And they all varry. Some are 2mbs, others 8mb – which to download?”
give me a break. kazaa is so easy to use no wonder it’s #1. it’s not really hard if you get 35 results look for the file that has a bit rate of 128k or whatever want you want. but you must definitely be in the miniority because millions of people can easily figure out kazaa, napster, etc.. speeds depend on your connection. if you have a modem, it’s going to be the same speed on the Apple service and kazaa.
Its already rampant NOW, only this morning was i asked to copy a movie for another friend because he wanted his friend to have it on VCD as well, he only asked me because i have the only CDRW in our circle of friends. I don’t even have a DVD Burner so to pirate a movie doesn’t even require one of those, just a DVD ROM drive.
In the past 2 weeks, i’ve had the chance to copy, keep, refuse Lordoftherings1+2, Equilibruim, Spiderman, RoadKill. I think its disgusting as well.
I personally am happy with the price of DVD’s considering their newness as a peice of technology and for the extras you get. I don’t have a need to copy them nor want to, I only buy region one however and thats cheap enough(UK resident). You don’t need to be a geek to get good deals either, juts pick up a DVD magazine and look at the ads in the back. However as usual…some people just don’t feel the need to pay, i suppose films have no value either to some.