McDonald's Billion-Song iTunes Giveaway 600
camperslo writes "The New York Post online
has this story.
"Less than a month after Pepsi announced a blockbuster deal to give away 100 million downloads from Apple's iTunes music service to its customers, McDonald's is close to a announcing a much bigger deal"." No matter what you think of iTunes, this is tremendous publicity for music on demand services in general. If the public gets a taste for it, this could be the beginning of the end for the audio CD.
In other News... (Score:3, Insightful)
AAC is nice and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mike
Re:What better way to..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yikes! (Score:3, Insightful)
I really hope not! At least with CD's I can still rip to whatever audio format I prefer, in whatever quality level I wan't. Can't do what with AAC files. (Well you could, but transcoding music can degrade the quality quite a bit)
It's also nice having something real, instead of a file that you may or may not own. Or worse, can disappear or become unplayable for who knows what reason they'd cook up.
Re:AAC is nice and all... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In other News... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just means more for the Beatles Apple label.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Step-in-the-right-direction Dept.? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What better way to..... (Score:2, Insightful)
I highly doubt they are going to be kind enough to give away just ANY free download. I'm sure they are already entered talks with various record labels about which bands will get pushed. I'll get you are going to wind up with about 200-500 different offerings to choose from through the McD's promotion.
However if they Do let me take and old song that I want when I buy a value meal, I could see myself eating there more often, even though the food tastes like masking tape.
Re:"it is unclear how McDonalds" (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever journalist wrote this should be sent home without lunch!
What the hell do you mean unclear?
Here, let's take a stab; Pepsi Co. announces 1 million song giveaway via redeemable codes on their three main product bottle caps. 1 in 3 caps will have a code valued at $0.99. Hundreds of thousands of iTunes Music Store users are now poised and ready to only drink and purchase Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist for the duration of the promotion because there really is no reason to purchase any other product since none of them are possibly giving you back $3 worth of music per 6 pack!
McDonalds announces promotion where the purchase of any combo meal will include a peel off sticker on the french fry container with 1 code redeemable for a free song valued at $0.99 at the ITMS. Promotion to continue until 1 billion free songs are given away. Millions of iTunes Music Store customers now opt for lunch at McDonalds since it's the only fast food offering where a $4 happy meal includes a $1 song reward. There's no reason to eat at Burger King.
You can watch for these bottle caps and happy meal stickers to be auctioned off enmase on eBay about 3 hours after the first promotion starts.
Collecting iTunes Music Store free song promotion codes will become the new baseball card of the 2004 summer.
Re:What better way to..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well considering that the deal between Apple and Pepsi [apple.com] allow you to use the credit on any song you want, I am betting that the McDonalds deal is going to be similar.
But are CD's really lossless? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AAC is nice and all... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why spread FUD? (Score:5, Insightful)
The previous arrangement with Pepsi lets you download whatever you want. Apple has stated repeatedly that they want to give all labels equal exposure (as in you can't buy better placement) in the Music Store.
Re:What better way to..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, maybe not. The last figures I saw showed that 45% of sales were toward full album purchases. iTunes is selling a lot of singles, but there are also a good deal of whole albums being sold.
Not only that but this will actually serve to push albums back into the main stream. It will no longer be profitable for a band to have 1 or 2 good songs and then poop out 9 mediocre ones to fill an album. Now if you want to sell an entire album you will make an entire album of quality songs. Those bands that concentrate on the super singles will find themselves left in the dust, since a single makes 1/10th the amount a full album does.
Consider the source! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:AAC is nice and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
But then only the older slashdotters have any idea I'm talking about.....
End of CD is here - in The Netherlands (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Dutch news, DVD sales have exceeded CD-Audio sales this year.
One popular Dutch artist is actually going to stop putting his music on CD, going DVD-only. (only returning to CD if DVD sales, against expectancy, aren't high enough)
There's several reasons for this
- DVDs cost about as much as DVD-audios here
- You get a LOT more value for money (various performances, videos, interviews, etc.)
- They think it's a little bump in the way of piracy.
The latter, as far as the music goes, is of course pointless to the educated masses.
But given the choice between
A. an 'expensive' DVD-R, spending quite a bit of time downloading the content, and optionally printing things out
or
B. the original without all the fuss, for not all *that* much money
I think B is going to be a choice for many.
The end of CD audio, at least here, started when people realized they were getting little value for money when compared to alternatives such as DVDs.
Not the end of CDs! (Score:2, Insightful)
Additionally with the new formats of digital audio media coming (like Super AudioCD) it's not likely that the size of the audio will decrease. There will ALWAYS be a market for the actual media. Look at the record itself... It's still around (mostly because of the audiophiles).
Re:In other News... (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, what we're talking about isn't necessarily the death of CDs, but the death of the album format. What's interesting about iTunes is that it gets around having to use a privately manufactured physical-ness for music. As a result, there's no need to package songs together into a single purchasing item. The transfer medium (bandwidth) is so cheap that each song can be sold on it's own instead of in a group. You don't have to press a new record or a new CD for each song. This is huge because the album format goes back to printing records on acetate back in the 20s. Really it goes back further to when travelling musicians had repertoires and you wouldn't buy a song, you'd buy an evening of music.
For instance, music stores could be made into iTunes hubs which have access to a private iTunes databank of FLAC files. Can you imagine going to the music store and downloading 10 singles you choose from their local iTunes database directly onto your iPod?
Now what about having the music store make CD-Rs of the 10 singles for you in the store?
Re:In other News... (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think the crud sound has anything to do with the medium. Someone spare us please from the not-quite-prodigious, auto-tuned to hell and back, child "artists".
Re:Bright Side... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just considering the salespeople, consider how long it takes to help a customer find what they're looking for, ring them up, chit-chat with them, etc. How long does it take a delivery guy to deliver a package?
Also, even if delivery jobs can't be outsourced, (1) neither can jobs in malls, and (2) the people owning, running, and espeicially building online stores can be outsourced.
In short, you're on crack.
Less Overhead for Apple this way? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, there are other costs invovlved in managing that kind of program, but if Apple sets it up well, they could actually be increasing their profit by making the retail vendors pay for some of those costs.
The sheer stupidity of the record industry... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, Apple takes the hit on the bandwidth costs, but how much do you want to bet that at least half of these people buy another track besides the free ones while they are at the store? And how many more of those millions of people are going to come back once they see how easy it is to buy music?
I seriously can't believe that there isn't anyone among the management and sales force of all these major studios that realizes the stupidity of their views.
Well, either stupidty or just sheer terror at change and seeing entire layers of management and middlemen made obsolete and jobless :)
Re:gasp! (Score:3, Insightful)
1,000,000,000 songs at $.99 each is $990,000,000
Of course, from what we've learned, with major record labels, the label keeps $.80 of the price, so this deal, if every single song is redeemed and done so on a RIAA song (I don't know that all RIAA labels keep the $.80 but it might be a safe assumption), then the RIAA labels make $800,000,000 off of this deal.
And Apple makes $190,000,000. Not chump change, but nowhere near a billion dollars. Plus Apple has to pay for bandwidth and hardware to meet that demand (I think a billion downloads would fry even well-ventilated Beowulf clusters, to say nothing of G5's).
Still, perhaps this is the economy of scale boost needed to finally win over the old RIAA.
And to think it all came from McDonald's and Pepsi.
Re:In other News... (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember that the 44 kHz sampling rate of the AIFF files on a CD is based on the theory that you need to sample at double the rate of the frequencies that you are attempting to measure in order to capture the waveform adequately. This is known as the Nyquist Frequency [rice.edu].
The problem is that this theory is actually intended as a "best-case" scenario where the signal is formed of all sinusoidal waves. In the real-world audio signals are often formed of extremely non-sinusoidal waves and thus they still have a lot of aliasing at 44 kHz sampling. Encoding formats such as AAC and MP3 do a better job of encoding a signal than straight sampling at 44 kHz because they can vary the sampling rate at various frequencies in order to better fit the original waveforms rather than just blindly sampling them and aliasing.
Yes AAC and MP3 "throw out" some of the data but so does a 16 bit, 44 kHz AIFF encoding. The difference is that both AAC and MP3 are designed to throw out data that is inaudible or barely audible and faithfully record the data that we can hear the best. AIFF encoding "throws out" the data in a blindly mechanical manner rather than doing so intelligently and thus can result in varying sound quality levels.
Which, in the end, is better? They all do a decent job but in the end it is up to your personal preferences. I find AIFF audio to be a bit tinny and AAC audio to be warmer, on the other hand AAC audio sometimes sounds over-saturated and AIFF doesn't seem to do that as much. It is all very subjective but don't begin to pretend that it is all as easy as a simple mathematical comparison.