McDonald's Billion-Song iTunes Giveaway

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.

I'll take a #2

[Dugsmyname]

-I'd like a #2 with a Diet Coke... Supersize and 2 iTunes tracks please.

-That'll be $4.59 for the meal, and $2.00 for the music, please drive-thru.

-Sweeeet!

So far, Apple and McDonalds haven't confirmed

[burgburgburg]

I'm not saying this isn't going through. I'd be very happy if it did. I'm just saying that having the NY Post as the sole source of your business news piece isn't confidence inspiring.

But...

[wildchild07770]

Is retrieving your songs going to require signing up for the service? Which includes credit card information. Also what if then the redemption goes wrong (you entere a code wrong/etc..) and you have millions of people getting billed for songs they thought were going to be free? Giveaways like this serve to increase a user-base out of which many will never return.

Step-in-the-right-direction Dept.?

[Murdock037]

How's that?

I like my CDs. I like being able to take something home from the store, and having something in my hand in case my computer crashes.

It's nice that iTunes is getting publicity-- it's a great service, it really is. But I don't want the CD format to die, and I don't think most consumers do, either.

The advantage of iTunes is choice beyond the traditional ways of buying music. What makes the online music phenomenon nice is the flexibility, not simply the elimination of physical media.

Re:AAC is nice and all...

[webslacker]

It's kind of hard to complain about this when it's a free for the customer.

It's a lot easier distributing 1 billion songs online than 70 million cd's.

McDonald's denies the rumor

[Therlin]

According to this article [macrumors.com], McDonald's is denying the rumor by saying "There are no agreements to announce, so anything else is pure speculation."

Re:How to get people to pay for music: give it awa

[gamgee5273]

Dude, you don't get it...think about it:

In Spring, 2004, there you are. You just picked up a case of Pepsi this past weekend and are eating at Mickey D's for lunch a couple of days that week...

Now you suddenly have six or seven of the iTunes giveaways. You go, check it out and find a few songs you want off, let's say, OutKast's new album. Then you go and check Amazon or Best Buy and think "Hey! With these freebies, I can get this album for 1/2 off what I would spend at the store!"

Then you're hooked.

The iTunes store is addictive - let me tell you. I've been very controlled on there and I've bought over $60 worth of music since it was unveiled for the Mac. I know others who have spent over $500 on music from there.

So, yes, you get people to pay for music by giving them a freebie. Who doesn't do that? You get the new Gillette razor in the mail, you get samples at the super market, your dealer gives you a free nickel bag... ;)

Re:In other News...

[Graff]

And I still like cd quality audio

CD quality - isn't that some sort of oxymoron? :-)

Remember that to make a CD they sample the masters at 16 bit and 44 kHz. This is quite a big loss in quality. For iTMS they also encode the music - not from the CD as you would at home, but directly from the masters. They encode it as a 128 kbps, 44kHz AAC file, which ends up sounding pretty close to CD quality. This is because AAC does a great job of keeping the encoded sound close to the original sound, especially when compared to MP3s at 128 kbps.

I've bought a good deal of tracks from the iTMS and they all sound just about the same as the CD versions. They certainly sound way better than stuff that I've ripped from CD to MP3 at 160 kbps.

I totally agree

[jocknerd]

The songs I've bought off of iTMS sound far better than the ones I have ripped myself as high as 192 kbps. Says something about the quality of CD's if you ask me.

Re:What better way to.....

[Golias]

The six degrees connections might not take long. Go to the iTMS and pull up the Motorhead album "March or Die."

As of right now, "Users who bought this album also bought"

The Neil Diamond Collection
Ultimate Manilow
Quadrophenia

iTunes users obvioulsy have much more varied tastes than one would think.

Online Music will bump up price of CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

As more people buy from online sources, record stores will become fewer and the cost of CDs will increase to a price where even fewer will want to buy them. The music companies will prefer and push online music because of the higher profit margin. This circle will cause the extinction of CDs.

It'll be just like when ATMs (Bank Machines) started replacing tellers at banks. It became harder and harder to find a teller (or a bank branch) and now banks often incur service charges to use a teller.

Enough music to last a loooong time...

[bytesmythe]

At an average of 3 minutes per song, it would take you just over 5700 years to even listen to all of them, much less download them! ;)

Re:AAC is nice and all...

[VividU]

I know you really want to believe what your saying. I wish it were true also. But the sad secret truth of vinyl releases is that they are pressed from digital masters. So you can be sure that any vinyl release came from a digital source. Its very rare these days for a major vinyl release to be completly anaglog from start to finish.

Its very rare for a vinyl pressing to follow this old-school signal train:

Analog 2" 24 trk -> 2" Master -> Vinyl Master -> Vinyl Release

More likely its this:

2" 24 trk (or ProTools) -> DAT Master (or HD) -> Vinyl Master -> Vinyl Release.

A lot of rock band still want to track 2" analog but its gonna get digitized at some point. No question.

If you know of otherwise, I'd love to know what releases were completly analog from start to vinyl finish.

Also, "lossless" isnt the best word to use for vinyl. Use "analog". There is no such thing as a lossless recording medium. Lossless is subjective word. Vinyl a limited dynamic range when compared to digital. Much more limited. So in that respect, you "lose" much more information. But vinyls can capture more "information" in its working dynamic range. Thats why its good for rock n' roll - all those harmonic distortions in the guitars are perfect for analog. You'd need a realy good setup to hear it though.

The best way to hear music is fresh off the 24" track 2" deck in the recording studio during mixdown. Everything else is inferior.