Apple Launches New Download Service

"Exclusive tracks from Sugar Ray" - Stop that train! Nordicskillz just bought a one-way ticket!

or firmware upgrade, yeah. I'm assuming the same.

Steve sez they are continually uploading songs every day. I'm hoping some indies get on board soon.

At the risk of sounding like one of the slashdot whiners, I'm also interested in finding out how 128k AAC sounds over my monitors vs. CD. Hmmm.

With AAC you lose less quality and you get a smaller file size*

I loaded up iTunes 4 and QuickTime 6.2 and ripped a CD that I'm very familiar with (Spiritualized's Lazer Guided Melodies) at 128kps AAC encoding and compared it with a 192kps mp3 encoding. I'm not a hard core sound engineer and the only spectrum analyzers I have are my ears and my admittedly rather poor hearing.

Bottom line: I can't tell the difference between the two encodings. In fact the only difference I could tell is the total file size. 83.9MB for the complete album as mp3s. 56.6MB as AACs.

Fortune Magazine

I don't see any previews, however.

Damn!

i'm still skeptical. digital rights management is still not the way in my opinion. being able to transfer a file to 3 computers is still not enough. i should be able to make a personal copy no matter how many times i need to. if a tape warps, i can remake the tape with my cd. and i can do that within fairuse as much as i'd like. same shit with a sound file. 15 years from now, i'll still have my cd. but i can know for a fact that 15 years from now, i won't legally be able to have that sound file. i will probably have gone through more than 3 computers.

"History proves that what works is the simplest, most intuitive thing," said recording artist Seal, who was on hand for the unveiling. "Technology is only a good idea if it helps you. As soon as it starts taking time out of your day, that technology is bad technology." (http://news.com.com/2100-1027-998675.html)

they still miss the point.
m.

Yes, but this new one allows us Mac people to be smug(ger).

- so you can burn it to audio CD unlimited times, but only share it between three computers? What stops you from burning it to audio CD, then ripping it back to MP3?

The "3 computers" thing means that you can only have the file on three computers at a time (and iPods don't count as computers). If you're not using a computer any more, you can "deauthorize" that computer and transfer the authorization to another computer.

What stops you from burning it to audio CD, then ripping it back to MP3?

Nothing. Go right ahead. Of course there will be some sound quality loss due to re-encoding, but if you're not some crazed uber-sensitive audiophile you probably won't notice or care.

Now imagine a scenario in which ordinary file-sharing programs -- Soulseek, for instace -- begin turning up more and more search results of these restricted AAC files. You download the song, and it won't play. Or it will play, but it will burn only silence, because that file has already exceeded it's three computer limit. Slowly but surely, it becomes impossible to get a reliable copy of "In da Club" that you can listen to on your car CD player -- unless you pony up the dollar for it.

Now, is this necessarily a bad thing? Use 45's as a comparison (and I think that as the music industry again moves away from albums, you'll see a lot more of this comparison). You could loan it to people, and when cassettes came along, you could even tape it. But in the end, it was worth everyone's while to just shell out the meager amount to own it themselves. After it all, it's a single -- it's a cheap piece of crap that may or may not contain the glory of God. A small risk for the potential reward. And if your little trifle is good enough, and enough people pay 99 cents for it, you get rich. Beautiful.

There's a world of possibility here. It could, done correctly, be the beginning of regular people making records again, and caring about making records, because each song holds the promise of fame and wealth. That's the way it was done in the 50's and 60's, and that's the way it could be again. But sooner or later, we the listeners have to cough up that all-important dollar.

Now where are the holes in this plan? Is it all about fair use? Is it really that important that this product be infinitely replacable?

Here is an mp3 of The Flaming Lips' "Race For The Prize" I ripped from my own copy of the CD in high-quality VBR (200 kbps).
Here is the same track that I bought from the iTunes music store, ripped to CD, and converted back to mp3 (also in high-quality VBR, although ending up at 194 kbps).

Size of the mp3 I ripped from my own CD: 6 MB
Size of the mp3 I got from the AAC conversion: 5.8 MB
Size of the AAC file: 3.8 MB

i'm still a little curious about what happens when a computer crashes and you can't reconnect to it to deauthorize the file and get one of your uses back.

hmm.

i wish this whole thing could be taken over by a non-profit 3rd party as well. soon enough the apple thing is going to conflict in a big bad way with microsoft's own DRM as well as the various other service's systems.

there should be a standard that all tech companies use to do this purchasing.

dvd was developed by commitee from the mistakes learned in the vhs/betamax wars... any new music format should be developed similarly.

until there's a clear stable format (like the cd was a stable alternative to the record and tape), the whole thing is gonna flop.
m.

ps an individual media product doesn't need to be infinitely replacable... but it's troubling that a collection could vanish. (or is it?) how would we feel if our records and cds and tapes just disappeared one day?

You are a self-sacrificing public servant, and we thank you. I'm at work, tho. Can anyone else tell me what the difference in sound is? Approximately?

*bows*

I can't really tell much of a difference. Not one that matters to me, anyway. Anyone hear something that I don't?

Boring technical setup: I'm on mac os 10.2, the newest quicktime, new itunes. I bought my ipod in Feb, but haven't yet downloaded the new ipod software update. And my ipod isn't set up with that "auto update when you plug it in" setting- i have "enable firewire disk use" on. AArrrrrgghhhh!!! I've read the help stuff, you're supposed to be able to put songs you download on yr ipod! Will it only work if you don't have the firewire disk use settting on? Haven't read that anywhere, but that's my best guess. :-(

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAC is a whopping 500Kb smaller, about 1/5 the size of the CD.

Apple claim 275,000 purchases in the first 18 hours, which is pretty good given the size of the mac user base. We'll see if this is sustained though. I guess a lot of people were trying it due to the novelty value of it all.

Matador are in talks to gain access to the service along with a lot of other independants.

I just joined up for three months ($11.95/mo.), even though they've got this download manager that's kind of a pain. Still, I've just downloaded all of the CCR albums, legally!

Technology, suck my dick. I'm happy with:

• iTunes pre OSX and LIMEWIRE
  
• Photoshop 6
  
• Illustrator 8 (5 was actually okay for a while and had better gradient tools)
  
• Quark 4
  
• Dreamweaver Ultradev and BBEdit
  
• Flash 5
  

New software has no place in this world until it actually improves something.

If you have dialup, hunting around in limewire & waiting hours to download from it is a pain in the neck- I'd rather pay $.99 & have it over with.

(haha, and this is coming from a fvwm user ;-) )

that seems kinda dickish. Why shouldn't ya pay for a song? the musician has spent the time to create it, if you want it why is 99 cents so bad? From all I've read. Apple's model seems pretty fair to all involved.

btw, have ppl seen this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/business/04MUSI.html

Umm, ethics.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58684,00.html

"There's a good chance that if the price was as high as 50 cents, services would still suffer because they're facing, practically speaking, competition at zero."

Ummm... I have 1.3 on my year-old iPod and I'm not sure what you mean by onboard playlists. Can I edit a playlist on my iPod??? If so, I can't figure out how.

"But sources say the major labels are charging Apple approximately 70 cents per download, so a lower price was not a viable option, considering other costs associated with the individual transactions."

http://www.gnutellanews.com/article/6830

1) Get the majors on board first and foremost. Done, with results.

2) Get the big/choice indies on now that Apple can turn around and say, "See? Works like a charm."

3) After that, continue marketing outward.

The more this goes on, the more I think Jobs and company made a masterstroke and a half, so let's see how it goes...

Which means it won't be any good for full mixes of dance singles (most of which are > 7m and not available as an album). Shit.

Also, I'm not against paying people for creating music, but I'm just wondering why so many are jumping headlong into Apple's model. I suspect it's a further testament to the power of the Apple brand-machine.

Now that said, eMusic was running a similar model in terms of choosing individual songs rather than full albums and essentially still goes at an exceptionally cheap flat rate, as you can see here. And they've already got a variety of indies on board, thus. So Spencer's note about the marketing is very appropriate -- eMusic has been trundling along but Apple's got the headlines, a new format, etc.

I'm just wondering about Apple's value proposition. I can download whatever I want at 192Kbps, single songs and full albums, for free on Slsk, Winmx, Kazaa lite, Limewire etc. Why should I give Apple money for that? It seems like the only positive thing is that artists will get some small amount per download - a good thing to be sure - but why give Apple your money? If you're really concerned about an artists financial well-being, then it's probably more effective to send them cash or go to a show...

V

Industry Offers a Carrot in Online Music Fight
By AMY HARMON

Like a lot of music fans roaming the Internet these days, David Bishop registers one basic sentiment when he thinks about the record industry. "They're a bunch of greedheads," he says. "They've been really fat on what I think of as huge profits and now they're trying to maintain the status quo."

Mr. Bishop is not your typical college-dormitory Internet pirate. A 49-year-old illustrator in San Rafael, Calif., he has steered scrupulously clear of file-sharing software like Napster and KaZaA. But he recently discovered how to play the music provided by other online fans without copying it, and has no compunction about flouting recent efforts to stamp out the practice.

"I'm not doing anything wrong," he insists.

Until recently, music executives have largely failed to acknowledge the millions of individuals, from teenage Eminem fans to Elvis-obsessed baby boomers, who have joined in what amounts to an online rebellion against the industry by some of its most important customers. Hoping to end Internet music piracy by ridding the world of the technologies that make it possible, they have so far focused on legal battles against KaZaA and its many brethren.

But for the first time in the Internet file-sharing wars, record industry executives have in recent weeks started to address music fans directly, both offering carrots and wielding sticks to persuade people to buy their product again. How well they succeed is likely to determine the way music is produced and consumed for years to come.

"The technology has destabilized us, it has hurt us," said Doug Morris, the chief executive of the Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal and the largest of the five major record companies. "But now it's going to take us to new heights."

The industry is pursuing lawsuits against music pirates but is also offering new ways to legally listen to and buy music online through deals like a recent alliance with Apple Computer.

That prospect may be difficult to achieve. Forty-three million Americans — half of those who connected to the Internet — used file-sharing software last month that allows people to copy music without paying for it, according to a survey by the NPD Group, a market research firm. The file-sharing program KaZaA, which rose in popularity after the record industry won its lawsuit against Napster, has been downloaded more than 270 million times, more than any other free program available on CNet's Download.com site.

The migration of music from shiny disks to the online arena has personalized debates about intellectual property rights once reserved for lawyers, turning passive consumers into political activists in increasingly large numbers. Having discovered the virtues of the new online form, many people are demanding the freedom to sample, trade and make available music in ways that were never before possible.

Some of those ways, like making unauthorized copies of hundreds of copyrighted songs without paying for them, are clearly not legal. Others may be the subject of a negotiation that the music industry is beginning to accept it may have to enter into.

"I have rights to listen to my music the way I want to," said William Raleigh, 33, a marketing manager in Los Angeles who says he never buys music produced by the major record labels, preferring to reserve his acquisitions for independent bands that sell CD's through the Web site CD Baby. "I'm not a criminal if I want to share it with some friends, and I'm opposed to the technology that tries to restrict my rights as a consumer."

Paul Vidich, an executive vice president with the Warner Music Group, a unit of AOL Time Warner, said that the degree to which people could share their music was a key point in the company's negotiations with Apple. They explored what the equivalent of playing music in a living room full of friends would be in the online world. Would it be O.K. for students in a dormitory room to share music with the room next door? With the whole dormitory?

They settled for now, Mr. Vidich said, on agreeing to allow the ability to share with people under one roof, or a radius of about 150 feet.

"What is personal use, where does it stop, where does pirated use begin?" Mr. Vidich said. "That is one of the questions that this whole Internet phenomenon has opened up and we all need to address it."

In response to a prolonged sales slump and a federal court decision in April that found the companies that distribute the file-sharing programs Morpheus and Grokster were not violating copyright law, record executives now say they are girding themselves for a new era.

They say they are responding more actively to legitimate consumer demands and are willing to brave the backlash that may come from pursuing legal action against individuals for making unauthorized copies of music in their homes.

They are also hoping that relinquishing some control over their product may also ultimately boost their profits. After all, Hollywood movie studios once battled the VCR as a threat to theater attendance — only to see that technology spawn the hugely successful home video business.

"We've turned the corner," said Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment. "When there weren't legal, good places to go buy music online the activity was cool, but once we get these services up, it's going to change people's behavior."

With the unveiling of the Apple music service in April, the major record firms have overcome much of their fear of cannibalizing compact disc sales with cheaper, easily copied digital downloads. They licensed their catalogs to Apple on more liberal terms than they had in the past, letting the new Apple music service sell songs for 99 cents. In just over a month, the service has sold more than 3 million tracks, far exceeding the record industry's expectations.

Bill Collage, a Sag Harbor, N.Y.-based screenwriter who has regularly used file-swapping software, said he has spent $60 at the Apple store since it opened on April 28.

"It's solved all my problems," Mr. Collage said. "It's so fast, and there's no guilt, no recriminations."

Last month, Sony and Universal sold their jointly owned online music subscription service, Pressplay, to Roxio, the company that purchased Napster's name and assets after it filed for bankruptcy. The Pressplay service, in which the two record labels retain a stake, is expected to be reintroduced soon bearing the Napster name — an acknowledgment by Sony and Universal that the service would be easier to sell to consumers under the brand that most epitomizes file-sharing.

And RealNetworks announced last month that its subsidiary Listen.com was dropping the price it charges subscribers to its Rhapsody online service to buy songs online to 79 cents.

These efforts to make purchasing music online more consumer friendly are being deployed even as the industry takes more aggressive legal action against online piracy.

After settling lawsuits against four college students accused of running "mini-Napsters" on their college campuses last month, the record industry's trade association is preparing to file lawsuits solely against individuals who have used software programs to let others copy music files from their personal computers.

"We have the right to control the property we own the way we want to," said David Munns, the chief executive of EMI Music North America. "To be successful I have to listen to what the consumer is telling me, but if that means me going broke that's not the answer. You've got to do what you've got to do."

The industry's position was bolstered by a ruling last week by a federal appeals court that forced Verizon Communications, a major Internet service provider, to hand over the names of four individuals whom the record industry suspects of illegally trading music using KaZaA.

The first lawsuits are likely to be filed this summer. "We're going to continue to address this with harsher and harsher means," said Mr. Morris of Universal. "If people are criminals I'm not concerned about alienating them."

As the file-sharing era has unfolded, Mr. Morris and other top record executives have largely remained silent, letting the leaders of its trade association, the Recording Industry of Association of America, speak out against piracy and field the fury of many music fans. (The association's Web site has become a favorite target of computer hackers).

Several executives said they have been spurred to take a more public role now because of persistent misperceptions about the costs of their business. Consumers think CD's are too expensive, they say, only because they don't realize how much the labels spend developing and promoting new artists, the vast majority of whom never sell enough to make back the investment.

Those costs have grown as radio stations have consolidated and stores like Wal-Mart, with less shelf space for CD's, are replacing stand-alone record stores as the main retail outlet for music, record executives say. Part of the industry's new strategy is to create a consumer education campaign on music industry economics.

Meanwhile, the industry's critics are calling for a more radical restructuring of the way music is distributed online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, is organizing a campaign to rally students to push Congress to create alternative approaches that would legalize some forms of file-sharing.

One would require record companies to license their entire catalogs to anyone who wants them for a fee set by the government. Another approach would levy a tax on Internet service providers and, perhaps, other related businesses to create a fund that would be used to compensate copyright holders based on a measure of how frequently individual songs are downloaded. For consumers, the tax would be less noticeable than directly charging for the music.

Advertisement


"Right now copyright law is broken and the music industry is bullying everybody into being scared," said Shari Steele, the foundation's executive director. "There are new ways of distributing music that don't require the record companies to be a part of it."

For its campaign, the group has paid for an advertisement, to be published in Rolling Stone and other publications next month, showing five people standing in a lineup with headphones on. "Tired of being treated like a criminal for sharing music online?" it reads. "Filesharing is music to our ears."

Roger Ames, the chief executive of Warner Music Group, said any plan that handed control of the industry's licensing to the government would simply shrink its revenues and prevent it from financing artist careers. As for the taxation idea: "It sounds like communism," Mr. Ames added.

However unlikely Congress may be to order the music industry to act differently, some analysts and many music fans argue that the record labels need to do more to wean people away from file-sharing services. For better or worse, the Internet file-trading bonanza of recent years has given lovers of popular music a taste of what it means to have near-instant access to almost anything created by their favorite performers for free, to use their personal computers as listening stations, to burn their own music mixes on CD's and e-mail songs to their friends.

"There's a lifestyle issue about how people want to use music that has been missed," said Russ Crupnick, vice president of the music division of NPD. "The industry needs to reconnect with consumers and understand what they are seeing here besides the free part."

I rarely pat myself on the back, but I'm rather proud of it. And it's not so much the air, but the branding of it.