Here is a perfect way to convince prince to switch back to apple.

www.apple.com

Amazing.

And you can actually watch the music videos. Check it out.

Interesting, but 99 cents too expensive per song. Kazaa and the newsgroups are free.

I'm not saying that is "right" or "wrong", but I don't think many people are going to buy songs off of there, comnpared to how many will download the same songs for free.

Although I could see myself using it if I heard some older song on the radio and didn't want to spend the time tracking it down elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if Apple can make money on this venture. I probably won't use it very often, but I'm only one person. Most people don't even understand the Usenet newsgroups, and many people are scared of file sharing.

Oh well, it could go either way as far as it being profitable...time will tell.

so you prefer to steal music at the expense of the artists who created them over paying for music and generating royalties for those very same artists?

I really like the "preview" feature - 30 seconds of each song before you buy. It's almost worth having the system just to preview all the music you want before a trip to the store to buy the CD. Is there anything worse than buying a promising CD only to find out that you only like one track?

On the other hand, the idea of having all of my music on a computer is somewhat off-putting. It's hard to move away from the complete CD packages. It's nice having the artwork, liner notes, visual display case, unique portability - sure the Ipod can travel with me, but will it plug into my car stereo or a million other CD players that currently play my stuff (in hotel rooms, cars, offices, homes, etc.) - that come with traditional CDs.

I'd imagine that the iPod files can be burned onto a CD-R, but will the files be MP3 format or traditional audio? Does the 0.99 cent purchase price mean that the file is now yours to copy elsewhere for your personal enjoyment, or are you stuck with the iPod itself if you want playback?

And what about access to obscure artists with the iTunes Music Store? Can the iPod be fed from other sources? At the Apple website, a sample iTunes webpage is shown. Who's paying to paste Eminem's sorry mug on the top of the page? Is it more of the same payolla that has crippled the industry, or do emerging artists get a shot as well?

Overall, it sounds like a product that will have a growing role in the future of the recording industry. It is the current topic over at the NPGMC chat room, but of course no one there can be bothered to stay on topic.

News Brief:

I read an article the other day that said the courts decided against the entertainment system in their attempt to sue ISPs. Since the ISPs can't be held liable for the downloading, individuals caught downloading illegaling will become the target of a law suit.

Okay, back to downloading...

alandail said:

What I personally prefer to do is not a logical part of the arguement. I am one person in a country of 300 million. What matters is how many people will prefer to pay for the music than downloading it for free.

If the downloaded songs are not mp3, it is really going to hurt the service even more. People want to be able to burn songs to compiliations and listen to them in their car, etc. If they can't do this, I doubt the service will succeed, or at least it won't be a big hit.

To answer all questions: It is not mp3, it is a new mp3 called ACC.

TonyC said:

http://www.apple.com/music/store/

You can burn regular audio cds, almost without limit. Apparently when you create a playlist you can only burn that playlist up to 10 times, but there's nothing stopping you from creating a new playlist with the same songs. Or something like that.

I just hooked up the service and it works great. Apple has come up with a new encoding scheme that sounds better than mp3, just a hair under the quality of an actual CD (but that hasn't stopped anybody before). You can download songs, share them, burn CDs, etc. They're yours, you paid for them. $.99 seems fair to me -- an album of ten songs (if you like all ten) costs you ten bucks. Remember that pricing structure? Reminds me of LPs. I'm a fan already. At this point the library isn't that deep (only 200,000 songs) but that will change as it catches on. Seems like a perfect thing for Prince to eventually get into because it solves the software and distribution difficulties we've all had with the NPG Music Club -- except the part about Apple getting $.45 of every $.99. I hope people get turned on.

I hope Prince makes a deal with Apple to release stuff here too - seems like a perfect way to get the vault out.

small correction - Apple gets $.34 of the $.99, not $.45.

Also, I think people, when considering the price, need to look at it from the perspective of how much that .99 saves. I downloaded 4 songs off of 3 CDs last night. I'm going to grab another tonight from a 4th CD. I spent $5 to get the 5 songs i wanted. Had I bought the CDs in the store, I would have had to spend about $50 to get these 5 songs. I have wanted these songs for a while, but not enough to buy the whole albums they were on.

Actually, I went to the store the other day to buy one of them, but could only find 2 CDs by the artist, both of which were greatest hits type CDs, neither had the song despite the fact it was a big hit.

Two of the other songs were missing from a greatest hits CD I bought for another artist despite the fact they were significicant hits. I am going to rip the greatest hits CD into iTunes and create a new playlist that includes these two songs I bought from apple's site along with the ones I like best from the greatest hits CD I did buy and create my own greatest hits CD for the car. I also can listen to my custom greatest hits CD playlist on my office computer, or our mac in the kitchen through a shared playlist. Or I can take my iPod (when I get it) and drop it in the iPod dock connected to my home theater stereo and listen to my custom playlist on there.

What's not to like? Nobody says you have to but all of your music this way, but there definately times that the price is a major plus in buying music that you perhaps wouldn't otherwise buy. The first thing I do when I bring a CD home is rip it into iTunes anyway, so instead of adding steps as some suggest, Apple's music store actually cuts steps for me.

U r all invited 2 discuss this further in "The Conference Room" or in the "U Tell Us" section.

TonyC said:

The purchased songs are in a new-generation of compression format, called AAC. Think of it as the future of MP3s...it is not an Apple-only file format; it is beginning to be accepted industry-wide and Apple is the first to completely embrace it.

A comparison:

You start with your original audio CD. You rip a track that's 4 minutes long, encoded as a 256 kbps MP3 (very high, nearly indistinguishable from CD quality sound). You end up with a file that's about 7.5 mb. If you were to rip that same track encoded at 128 kbps in AAC format, you'd end up with sound quality BETTER than the 256 kbps MP3 and the file size would be about half that of the MP3.

Using Apple's iTunes (and plenty of other cross-platform software) you can burn audio CDs from AAC files. So, essentially, AAC files mean your audio tracks sound better and take up less space. This is a very good thing.

All that said, it still doesn't sound good enough for me for any serious listening -- for the big stereo I go with CDs. But I'll trade a hair of quality for the convenience of not dragging a million CDs into my car. What would be great is the AAC codec with the option for a higher bitrate. I've already seen some discussions on the Net that complain 128 AAC isn't as good as 192 or higher mp3. But people will complain...

TedW said:

I understand people's hestiancy to ditch their CDs altogether for lossy-compressed digital files. C'T magazine (a German industrial mag) did tests on AAC, MP3 and CD audio files -- read the translated results here:

http://www.geocities.com/...3test.html

And read Apple's page describing the differences between AAC and MP3 here:

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

And read about the AAC format from the true source:

http://www.vialicensing.c...ndard.html
[This message was edited Wed Apr 30 14:33:01 PDT 2003 by Doozer]

um $25 npgmc money = one streaming audio, 3 streaming video
$25 apple money=25 ACC Prince songs
Im sticking with Apple

macs are cool!

I read on C|Net that the Apple Music Store had a pretty decent opening.

275K downloads at $.99 each in the first 18 hours, and still going strong. I bet that already dwarfs any revenues from Artist Direct and MusicNow.

There is really no need for this AAC format, and mp3s will continue to rule. Hard drive and memory space becomes cheaper every day, so who cares if AAC files are smaller. Eventually, there will no need for compressed files and everyone will just use .wav files, but until then mp3s are going to stay the "standard".

But if you are enjoying the Apple service, then more power to you and I'm sure the AAC format is not that much of a hinderance if you have all the software.

But I don't see a big improvement in maybe fitting 300 songs in AAC on a CD, versus 150 songs in mp3 on one CD...I don't think hardly anyone cares and time will prove this correct.

TonyC said:

What time has told so far:
People are using the shit out of itunes4.
ACC sounds better than mp3, and people are converting mp3 to ACC, what software? lol
No, not everyone will use crappy ass .wav, lol
what do you work for NPGMC?
lol

Over 1 million songs have been purchased at the Apple Music Store in less than a week. 1 million was their first month goal and they've beat that in less than a week. Keep in mind that Apple only has a 4% market share. As long as they can keep building their inventory they will do fine. I see this as the perfect format for selling "bonus tracks" that you only get on European/Japanese import singles. I would much rather pay $.99 for these songs as opposed to paying $10+ for an import single. Bands could release a new live track each week and keep the hardcore fans coming back for more.

judaskiss said:

Nice to see SMART individuals on here!

I go to the Music Store in, like, two seconds. It knows who I am. I click on Alicia Keys and in another two seconds I'm watching a streaming music video in big, fat Quicktime, four minutes long with no hiccups. I am happy.

I go the Music Club with IE 'cause it doesn't recognize my browser. It's slow. I go through the entry page. It doesn't know me. I eventually get to the room to watch a streaming video in nasty Realvideo, which doesn't stream properly, and I by the time I get to the first of many hiccups, I'm four or five minutes into this. I am not happy.

I like the idea of the Music Club -- hey, I'm a member and a fan. But the technology is not impressive. Can't something be done to bring us into the 21st Century?

This is perfect for NPGMC.

Why not?

Release an exclusive to apple.

Make itunes for apple members and give pcs the crappy version that is being used now for npgmc.

Then stream playlists of Prince music.

YEAH!

XLBubba said:

Right that's why most people own Macs which are clearly superior to PC's. Oh wait they don't. Unless and until Apple gets the hardware manufacturers on board, not just PC's, but portable mp3 players, car mp3 players, etc.. Then this will just be another technically superior niche product from Apple that never reaches the masses IMHO.

That said, I hope Apple, or some other firm, is able to pull this off as it looks like a viable business model.

.
[This message was edited Mon May 5 13:55:16 PDT 2003 by Universaluv]

Universaluv said:

XLBubba said:

Then this will surely fail

Universaluv said:

Im still waiting for apple to go out of business.

LOL

the iPod is the #1 selling mp3 player. It now plays the superior AAC files too. Dolby AAC is the audio portion of the MPEG4 standard, and is the industry standard intended to replace MP3. Apple is first on board with support, but it is the industry standard.

The iPod fully supports windows.

iTunes 4 is being ported to windows, thus the iTunes Music Store will be available for windows.

iTunes 4 is being licences by AOL. Windows support, AOL license, #1 selling MP3 player, industry standards, I think they're reaching the masses.

Without the windows client for iTunes, Apple still managed to sell 1 million songs in he first week of the store. And they sold 110,000 iPods as well. That's about $45 million in music revenue for Apple last week.