04 Mar 2003 | pk said...

Pretty good news I suppose. I wonder if you will be able to preview a song for a couple of days before dropping the money on it.

04 Mar 2003 | pb said...

I don't know why this has never been done but if someone really wanted to offer a service to facilitate the trialing of music, they should simply make available imperfect copies for free. Imperfect can take numerous forms: shortened, lower quality, ticks, noise, pre/post-pended message, etc. Then if you like it you buy it either with a clean download or by "perfecting" what you already have.

04 Mar 2003 | alisha said...

Ive been waiting for this moment. Im so sick of waiting for mp3s (good labels, wide variety) to be sold online (easy to use and easy to buy) per single.

"Secondly, the only way this sort of thing is going to ever work is if its beautifully designed and tightly integrated with both the desktop and a portable MP3 device."
--
why do you say that? why has it taken so long?

04 Mar 2003 | indi said...

I wonder what kind of DRM will be added to my Mac and my iPod? I can't believe the music companies would go for it unless such protections exist. I know I'll give it a try if it allows purchasing singles and or previews of all songs on an album.

04 Mar 2003 | Don Schenck said...

Leave it to Apple. Good folks.

04 Mar 2003 | pk said...

Will it be MP3s? The article didn't say (unless I missed it). I wonder how tight of a control will be there? Will you be able to transfer it from one drive to another? (desktop -> ipod ->other desktop)

04 Mar 2003 | SU said...

Will it be MP3s? The article didn't say (unless I missed it).

Nope, MP4 format (aka "AAC"). QuickTime 6 allows you to use this format today -- it keeps the quality high and produces even smaller files than MP3.

Will you be able to transfer it from one drive to another? (desktop -> ipod ->other desktop)

Doubtful without 3rd-party software, since Apple doesn't let you do this now out of the box.

04 Mar 2003 | JF said...

pb, I agree with your "imperfection" idea. Makes a lot of sense.

04 Mar 2003 | hurley#1 said...

If the providers of these files aren't limited to record companies, it could be a boon to individual musicians and bands with talent but limited market appeal who have access to recording equipment but not enough budget to press, print, and distribute CDs.

04 Mar 2003 | ek said...

I thought this part of the article was funny:

But the Apple offering won over music executives because it makes buying and downloading music as simple and nontechnical as buying a book from Amazon.com, one source said..."This is exactly what the music industry has been waiting for,'' said one person familiar with the negotiations between the Cupertino computer maker and the labels."

Really? I thought the labels were the ones making it so difficult and technical in the first place?

04 Mar 2003 | pb said...

But who really knows what "This" is referring to?

04 Mar 2003 | Joshua Kaufman said...

More from News.com

04 Mar 2003 | ek said...

Some interesting tidbits in this L.A. Times piece about the service (requires free registration):

The executives also like the massive marketing plan designed by Jobs to educate consumers about the service.

This could be the most important thing about this whole concept. The existing services have done zero to educate consumers.

Another interesting tidbit:

Rather than make the songs available in the popular MP3 format, Apple plans to use a higher fidelity technology known as Advanced Audio Codec...That approach allows the songs to be protected by electronic locks that prevent them from being played on more than one computer. Still, sources say, Apple wants to enable buyers to burn songs onto CDs. That feature would effectively remove the locks...That's been a sticking point for executives at Sony, sources said. The other four major record companies, however, appear ready to license their music to the new service.

Why am I not surprised to hear that Sony is the one company that's not on board?

04 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

Selling music online should be pretty simple for it to work. You basically need to only follow two basic concepts:

1) make it cheap

2) make it non proprietary

The article doesn't mention anything about #1, and doesn't really go into detail on #2.

If I can purchase songs at a much lower price than a CD, and I can do what I want with said songs, then I'm all for this.

04 Mar 2003 | SU said...

Why am I not surprised to hear that Sony is the one company that's not on board?

Ironically, Sony makes most of the CD/DVD burners found in current PowerMac G4 towers. This whole scene is sticky for a company like Sony who, through acquisitions in the 80s and 90s, folded content creation into a business built on content sharing.

04 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

You basically need to only follow two basic concepts:

Ugh. What an awful sentence.

Yea...sony is an odd company. They make money on the media side through intellectual property (music/movies/video/gaming) and the hardware to make copies of said media. On top of that, they try and keep proprietary systems such as MiniDisc alive as well.

04 Mar 2003 | SU said...

This post on December 11th, 2002 to Slashdot hinted at this service.

Macosrumors also mentions this exact thing way back in June 2001:

In the longer term, and as part of an impressive upgrade to Apple's entire family of multimedia content creation and disc burning applications, Apple is working on building a service by which iTunes users can search for their favorite music and buy it in a QuickTime-based MP3 audio format that includes digital rights protection. Depending on the record company, songs can be bought separately or as whole albums. The cost of the average CD release would be $6, according to company cost projections, although options to reduce that cost even further are being discussed.

Could be interesting to see how this shapes up.

04 Mar 2003 | scottmt said...

yay Apple. This will be an update to iTunes I'm guessing, and flows into their "digital hub" niche nicely.

AOL is set to launch their own pay service, a web article eludes me .. but it sucks ! for 9 bucks a month you can download as many song as you want, but they self destruct when you stop paying .. which brings up all kinds of format questions to me. probably a proprietary player at least. for double the cost you can burn 10 songs a month.

If the songs really are near a buck, and its easy, this will be a great example for apple to set.

04 Mar 2003 | spook said...

Ironically, Sony makes most of the CD/DVD burners found in current PowerMac G4 towers. I read someplace that Sony Music was sueing Sony Electronics because of puts CD burners in it's computers. I wonder what Mr. Sony thinks about all of this.

04 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

The cost of the average CD release would be $6

That's getting closer. They may be on the right track.

I think they need to lower the per-song costs to 50 cents (about $6 a CD) or, ideally, down to 25 cents ($3 an album). At that point, I think a good chunk of the population wouldn't mind paying for a decent amount of their MP3s.

At current CD prices, I have to admit, I don't buy a whole lot. At $3 an album, It's hard NOT to feel obligated to buy an album that you like...hell, it's only $3!

I don't think the DRM is needed. People that pirate will always pirate. The goal of this shouldn't be to eliminate pirating, but to encourage those that WANT to pay a bit for the music and support the system to do just that. Don't hinder them with another hoop to jump through.

I'd hate to buy these albums and find out that they ONLY work on MY Mac and MY iPod. Media should be licensed to the USER...not the hardware.

But that's just my random opinion, of course.

04 Mar 2003 | AJ said...

There is one thing that worries me about a pay-per-song model: will well-crafted, cohesive record albums be left behind in favor of a single-of-the-month approach?

To some extent this is happening already... personally, I like the sense of discovery in finding tracks that may not be radio-friendly, but are amazing in the context of the rest of the record. Granted, I'm not often willing to fork over $20 per album to take this chance. A new pricing structure would help a lot- $6/CD sounds reasonable.

04 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

will well-crafted, cohesive record albums be left behind in favor of a single-of-the-month approach?

I think well-crafted, cohesive albums are long gone. There are certainly some, but not a lot.

I think the pay-per-song approach would actually be better for the artists. They can fine tune their good compositions and not have to deal with filler material. More of an EP concept than a 'we need to justify the $16 cost' concept.

It'll totally mess up the recording industry, though, as they still think in terms of these individual shiny discs.

04 Mar 2003 | said...

I think well-crafted, cohesive albums are long gone. Who knows, maybe this will bring them back?

04 Mar 2003 | hurley#1 said...

The only thing that makes me nervous about this is the involvement of the major labels. Will they be the only ones allowed to offer content? Or will independents and individuals be able to sell recordings this way too? I own a few hundred CDs and probably only five of them are from major labels, I just don't listen to most mainstream stuff. And as a musician myself with a small but good setup for recording, it would be great to think that I could turn out my own tracks and bring in a few dollars without having to do a CD.

04 Mar 2003 | Jin said...

It'd be really great if for a small additional fee, musicians were able to get .Mac+ or some such service that allows participation in the music service.

05 Mar 2003 | Don Schenck said...

Something like this could swing younger buyers into the Apple camp. This, alone, could be enough of a decision point. I know it sound very compelling to me.

My next PC? Perhaps a Mac!

05 Mar 2003 | J. said...

I buy CD's for two reasons:

1- Support the artist
2- Higher quality than MP3

Will AAC MPEG4 quality be sonically indistinguishable from the original CD/AIFF/Redbook?

Also, I'd much prefer artists to get ALL the money I've paid, not 1 or 5%.

05 Mar 2003 | Bill Brown said...

I am really excited by this because it could potentially free us avid music listeners from the album release cycle. Okay, first, I am not suggesting that this relatively minor online music play is going to transform the music industry. Instead, I think that it might be a vanguard or portent.

By this I mean the approximately two-year cycle of album, tour, recording, album, tour, recording, and so on. Instead, musicians/labels could release songs quickly after recording and make them available for purchase individually.

They would be able to create buzz because there'd be a steady flow of new music. Also, radios would play more of their music since people could no longer be duped into buying a CD just for one or two good songs. The online music servicesnot just Apple's because success breeds repetitionwould implement some sort of "Notify me when Radiohead releases a new song."

Eventually, this would also enable artists to sign four-song deals instead of locking them into multi-record contracts that benefit only the labels. The artists could also try new things and gain immediate feedback through sales figures.

I am extremely excited by this prospect and would gladly fork over 99 per song.

06 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

I buy CD's for two reasons:
1- Support the artist

If it's a major label artist, then you're probably really only supporting the label. Very little goes to the artist (see links elsewhere in this thread).

Will AAC MPEG4 quality be sonically indistinguishable from the original CD/AIFF/Redbook?

A high quality MP3 is theoretically sonically indistinguishable. Most stereos and few humans can actually hear the full sonic range of a CD.

Also, I'd much prefer artists to get ALL the money I've paid, not 1 or 5%.

Well, that's all buying a CD will do. Even online, though, the labels are going to be taking a chunk.

The main issue is that the recording labels really aren't NEEDED anymore. And that's why they're so paranoid. Once online music takes off (in a commercial manner, that is) the labels are really just yet-another-unecessary-middle-man and the artists, hopefully, will mass migrate to a self publishing model.

06 Mar 2003 | Cade Roux said...

I always used to say that if an actual CD was $5, no one would bother to steal music at all. I read that people spend a fixed amount of money on music, but at higher prices they just buy less variety. Most people *do* like to buy whole albums and they like to have an actual CD. If the prices weren't artificially inflated and price-fixed by the recording industry, the music industry would make a lot more money and the market would open up to people who could try more types of music and would not be bothered to steal.

Online music will never work until the recording industry is destroyed by their own greed, because no one wants to pay for intangibles and be told you have a limit to what you can do with it. Once the music industry rises again, I think we will see the market reborn in a more realistic way. Right now, we are seeing the death of a recording industry which cannot change to fit the new realities of their customers, and a music industry which cannot overcome the slavery of the recording industry.

With a CD you always have a backup, and you pay for the right to use the music once, not over and over again when you lose the file or lose the computer or whatever. People understand buying a CD, even though after "buying" a CD, they still don't have many real rights.

06 Mar 2003 | hurley#1 said...

Online music will never work until the recording industry is destroyed by their own greed, because no one wants to pay for intangibles and be told you have a limit to what you can do with it

But people buy DVDs now, which are copy-protected. A new generation of CDs and CD players is also reportedly being developed that are copy-protected as well.

I agree that the recording industry is too greedy for its own good, but if we put them to death then the musicians will have to find some other way to put up the money for big recording projects. Professional recordings with studio musicians can cost a lot of money (one CD I played on cost $20,000 to produce, and that was acoustic music with no overdubbing or studio effects), and the labels front those expenses now. How would this work in the future? Would musicians have to get bank loans, and would a bank take on that kind of risk? Record companies can take the risk because the know the market (or think they do), but banks don't have that kind of expertise.

06 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

A few related links from Macintouch today:

overview of AAC:

http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/aac/

Sony wanting to buy Apple and Palm:

http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/2100531

06 Mar 2003 | Cade Roux said...

hurley, I see your point about the risk of capital - I think the recording industry does risk a lot, but they have not been open to new ways to mitigate the marketing risks.

I think the popularity of DVDs prove my point - a two-hour DVD is 19.95, but a one-hour CD is 17.99 or worse? People really only care about the value. People mainly pirate movies not available on DVD on Kazaa. Once it's on DVD, it's not as popular on Kazaa. I have a 4-CD SVCD of The Two Towers someone got of the Internet - no one will want that for free when they can get the DVD for 19.95. Who wants to see a over-hyped new movie in the cinema for a ridiculous $6.50 a person (and that's in New Orleans - cheap movie territory) when you can download it for free now or wait for NetFlix or buy the DVD and watch it over and over again?

06 Mar 2003 | Cade Roux said...

To put this in further context, when RCA invented the VHS, Disney wasn't interested because they wanted to know how many people would be in the room watching it and wanted to make it non-rewindable, so that you could only view it once. Now how much does Disney make from VHS tapes and DVDs of kids' classics?

I think the rapid pace of technology has caused a number of industries to lobby for enshrinement and entitlement with copyright extension etc, and these powerful economic lobbies need to be properly put back in their place, or out of business.

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