Apple Launches Paid Music Service

Wired News ^ | 4/28/03 | Leander Kahney

[Brett66]

Apple Launches Paid Music Service

By Leander Kahney | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next

01:46 PM Apr. 28, 2003 PT

SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a slick and easy-to-use song download service on Monday that some experts said breaks down the barriers to online music distribution.

At a big launch event in downtown San Francisco, Jobs showed off Apple's new iTunes Music Store, which makes more than 200,000 songs from all five major music labels available at 99 cents a download.

"The Apple online music store is going to be the hottest way, we think, to acquire digital music," he told the crowd of 200 press, musicians and executives from the music and computer industries.

Dressed in his trademark jeans and turtleneck, and looking fashionably stubbly, Jobs said the service strikes the right balance between the convenience of downloading music over the Net and the need for the industry to get paid.

The service, he said, allows Apple to refashion its controversial mantra from a couple of years ago, "Rip, mix, burn," into the much more music industry-friendly "Acquire, manage and listen."

Built into iTunes (and already dubbed "Buy Tunes" by wags), the service is being hailed by musicians, analysts and executives as a breakthrough in online music distribution.

"It's great news for the whole industry," said Dennis Mudd, CEO of MusicMatch, who attended the event. "For the first time the labels have licensed downloads that have reasonable rules for use. It's the first pay-music service that's better than illegal music services."

MusicMatch offers a rival streaming service called MX, but has also partnered with Apple to provide jukebox software for the Windows' version of Apple's iPod.

Mudd said Apple's negotiations with the labels has finally broken down most of the barriers to online distribution. Now that Apple has struck digital distribution deals with the majors, he expected it would be a lot easier for others to do so also.

According to Jobs, the Internet was "built for music delivery," but to date no legitimate delivery mechanism rivaled the scope and convenience of file-trading networks like Napster or Kazaa.

Jobs argued the convenience, quality, reliability and "good karma" of Apple's new service will overcome the attraction of getting songs for free from file-trading networks.

The service dispenses with subscriptions, offering 200,000 songs from all the major labels a la carte. Jobs said new songs are being added daily.

Onstage, Jobs demonstrated ordering and downloading songs with a single click. The entire online library of songs at the store can be previewed as 30-second clips.

Songs can be burned in unlimited quantities to CDs or transferred to Apple's iPod player, which is closely tied into the service. At the event, Jobs also unveiled a new line of redesigned iPods, which now offer 30 GB of storage, enough for 7,500 songs.

According to Jobs, the service suffers from none of the drawbacks of file-trading networks or the current crop of online music services.

Consumers can be assured of quality and reliability. Once bought, they can keep songs for as long as they want, share music on up to three Macintosh computers, and transfer songs to any number of portable iPods or CDs.

"It's not free, but it's 99 cents a song, pretty doggone close,'' Jobs said. "There's no legal alternative that's worth beans."

Rest of article here:

PT-2

[George from New England]

I would also be concerned that this "music service" software that would be required on my computer would be spyware. Can we trust the music industry? Once you install their secure/download/player program it could report back about all the MP3 files you already have on your system, etc.

Buy one song, expose yourself to much greater liability.

[savedbygrace]

That is a very real and very large concern. I think that's the killer, more than the cost per song.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

You're forcing me to repeat myself: Time will tell.

Personally, I don't think we'll have to wait too long. This is a massively stupid move by Apple (see my #10). Apple, whose manufactering is down is now positioning itself in the service industry? You can't just change hats over night and decide: "Today I'm going to offer a service that I want everyone with a Mac to not be able to live without" when yesterday you were saying: "I offer hardware" and expect to make a profit. Apple has already tried the service industry as an ISP- their "free for life" mac.com accounts didn't last a life-time barely 2 years, before Jobs had to impose a price structure.

This move of their won't necessarily sink them, but it won't help. And the last thing I'd do is invest in Apple right now, particularly after the losing mac.com strategy.

[the Wayne]

The price is not unreasonable. You're still thinking on CD terms where you buy the whole CD to listen to 4 or 5 good songs. Now you can download just the 4 or 5 songs you like and it's only $4 or $5.

[SauronOfMordor]

Well, Apple sales are down 65% from this time last year, they'd better think of something. Personally, I doubt if this will do it for them.

They would be better off canning the special Mac hardware, and merging OS/X with Linux. There's a reasonable amount of good Mac software that would make the Linux market take off

On the music: bad price point. At .25/track it would probably take off -- put down $25 and download any 100 of your favorite tracks. A decent number of people would go for that.

[Revolting cat!]

I must say proudly (and sinfully, I suppose) that for once I beat you commenting on the price structure (another thread earlier today.) The price must be perceived as "cheap" or negligible, just as the price of the 45RPM disks way back when was perceived as negligible, and with that you received a tangible object, oftentimes with an illustrated cover, and always, oh my, with a magical label. Stax, RCA Victor, Decca, Brunswick, Coral, those were the days. What will you receive now? Just another computer file that it costs Apple or whoever offers this service, next to nothing to manufacture and serve up.

[SamAdams76]

The price is not unreasonable. You're still thinking on CD terms where you buy the whole CD to listen to 4 or 5 good songs. Now you can download just the 4 or 5 songs you like and it's only $4 or $5.

But how would you know what are the good songs unless you listen to them first? Many times, when I buy an album, my favorite songs end up being the ones that I would never hear on the radio. And it usually takes a few listens to make that determination.

[the Wayne]

If I had $0.99 for every time someone said Apple was dying, Apple was a goner, or Apple had blown it, I'd be rich.

This talk of this music service being a mistake or that Apple's trying to go into a completely different business is silly. The iPod is dramatically different than their computer market, yet it is enormously successful, it's the trendsetter, and it has a great marketshare. And the iPod ties seamlessly into iTunes, which ties seamlessly into their other leading edge products that have made photos (iPhoto), movies (iMovie), and DVD creation (iDVD) easy to use.

This kind of integration and ease-of-use allows Apple to tie in content in a way that's market-leading, and it could end up being as brilliant as the iPod itself. Apple's not abandoning their core computer market. After all, a Mac and MacOS X is the central hub of this strategy. It'll always be easiest to use and most-integrated on the Mac, but they'll also gladly sell an iPod and music to PC users, too.

[savedbygrace]

I think I read somewhere today that part of this service will be some sort of a preview of the cut before you buy.

[NewEnglandNative]

You can buy single tracks for $0.99 apiece or (most) whole cd's for $9.99. (The record companies are reportedly getting $0.65 a song.)

AAC is a standard format as far as I know -- it's not just something Apple cooked up.

The service is debuting on the Mac but will be available for Windows later in the year.

You can listen to free 30 second samples of every song.

I've been browsing it today and it's pretty slick indeed -- you browse, sample and buy tracks right from the mp3 player that comes bundled with the computer. Just click and the track downloads into your playlist and starts playing, ready to burn to cd or be transferred to another computer or iPod. The service is pretty well done. The biggest problem I see is the still somewhat limited selection -- only 200,000 songs.

[Ciexyz]

What about golden oldies? Why should I pay .99 cents to download "On the Boardwalk"?

Yet this is the type of music I'd want to download, NOT the latest Christina Aguilera.

People are downloading an artist's complete collection of CD's. They don't think of the cuts as "A" and "B", they regard the album as an "experience" and an example of the artist's creative outut. I personally would want to hear the entire album.

[SamAdams76]

And that's my point. There is practically no overhead and the download fee is almost pure profit for Apple and the record companies. Charging a dollar a track is obscene. Like you pointed out, it's not as if you are getting something tangible like a 45 record with artwork on the picture sleeves and all that. I've got boxes of these 45s up in the attic and no doubt I can get big money for them on E-bay if I was so inclined. What will I get for the 5MB MP3 files twenty or thirty years from now? Absolutely nothing. By then, these MP3 files will be as archaic as a Winchester disk drive and all the recorded music of the world will probably fit on your wristwatch. But those 45 vinyl records will be worth even more! Which means I'm hanging on to them.

[SamAdams76]

How many of these songs did you download today? You are right that 200,000 is not much of a selection. By comparison, KaZaa currently has nearly 1,000,000,000 (yes, that's one billion) files available to download. Of course, there are many duplicates and no way to determine how many unique files are actually available.

I did have a question about this service. Once you pay for a download, do you have the right to download that track again? For example, what if over the course of the next year you pay $3,000 to download 3000 songs and your hard drive crashes. Do you then have to pay $3,000 all over again to get your music back? Or does Apple track what you've bought and allow you to download them again at no charge?

I think that would be a very important selling point of the service. That way, you could load up your iPod without worrying about what would happen if all your music was stolen, lost or corrupted. You could just access your account and download your collection all over again.

Yeah, you could do your own backups too. But how many people, after all these years, backup their data like they should?

[Mr. Thorne]

The Gnutella client for the mac is called Limewire. It works swimmingly.

MP3s are MP3s are MP3s. They play delightfully well upon any platform which will support them. Which the Mac will, using iTunes or Audion or half a dozen other player programs.

Audion is my personal favorite, just for the visuals. I prefer a more customizable ui for my player. But that's just me. iTunes does the job just as well. Either one will rip an mp3 file from an audio disk, either one will convert the mp3 back to .aiff and burn it to a disk.

As to the price... well, some will pay for the privilege of legality, some will not. Apple's at least got a choice out there now. With any luck, competition will follow and the prices will drop a bit.

I do like the comments about "$10 per disk" being no better than the current price. Seems to me that's $10 for 10 songs that YOU, SPECIFICALLY, want. Not 2 songs you want, and 8 more the Sony exec needs to push. I should think that would make a difference.

[Timesink]

Looks like you can only join if you are on a Mac.

For now. Windows availability is coming. For once, just once, you have to wait a few months instead of us.

[ezo4]

Id use a mac but Im not gay

[Timesink]

Who knows the limitation of these .AAC files ?

They're MPEG standard, and far more advanced than MP3s. A 128K AAC file is indistinguishable from an actual CD to most people, including many "audio experts." You'd need at least a 320K MP3 to get even in the same ballpark. Apple's simply ahead of the pack, as usual. AAC will be the standard relatively soon.

[Timesink]

Better call out the Mac Heads; the haters and know-nothings are out in force on this one.

[saltlick]

"It's not free, but it's 99 cents a song, pretty doggone close,'' Jobs said.

$7425 to fill up that 30 gig ipod. . .

[daviddennis]

The naysayers are wrong.

This system is a seriously compelling shopping experience. I bought $11 worth of music today through it (one single, one album) and thought it worked brilliantly.

In order to use a service like Kazza, you have to open your computer up and have people download from you. If you happen to be using a corporate Internet connection, that's not really possible; you're sabotaging your company's web site bandwidth. And my home internet connection has a couple of my personal servers, so when I tried Kazaa, it would slow down everything else to a crawl.

Better to pay for what you get so you can get what you pay for. I really like Apple's service. I had to physically stop myself from buying more music, reminding myself the service will still be around tomorrow :-).

D