iTunes Music Store - 'Coolest Invention of 2003' 370
Pingsmoth writes "Time Magazine has just named the iTunes Music Store as their Top Coolest Invention of 2003. Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man'."
Other cool things (Score:0, Informative)
Robo Lobster: For clearing mines
Robo Cat: Sits there and does cat like things with all the mess
Rus
Finally, UNCOMPRESSED online music! (Score:0, Informative)
Let's compare this service to iTunes, the most popular current service.
Price:
iTunes - $0.99 per song
Magnatune - $5.00 an album
If it's a good album without crappy filler then Magnatune is the big winner here. Classical fans get a great deal, but pop fans may not, depending on the band. Overall, I'd give the edge to Magnatune, but not a big one.
Format:
iTunes - AAC with some annoying DRM
Magnatune - Uncompressed WAV's!!!
Absolutely no contest here. Finally an online music store has listened to audiophiles! They'd be smart to use a lossless compression format to save on their bandwidth costs though...
Ethics:
iTunes - Apple takes it's (big) cut and then the Artist's (frequently RIAA affiliated) label takes most of the rest.
Magnatune - The artist gets 50%!!!
Again, no contest. Instead of feeling guilty about fueling a powermad monster when you buy music you can feel good about supporting the people who actually made it!
Selection:
iTunes: Lots
Magnatune: Not a lot
iTunes is the clear winner here.
To sum up, you get more for your money with magnatunes, including peace of mind. You just can't get many albums there... yet. If magnatune manages to get off the ground that may change, but they have a long road ahead of them. Their biggest challenge is getting more content. In my opinion they need to forge alliances with other like-minded independant labels. There are a lot out there, but many use mail-order as their only form of distribution! Magnatunes needs to get these labels on board pronto.
Smart Playlists.. (Score:3, Informative)
Invention/Idea Forum on SlipHead.com (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Invention? (Score:2, Informative)
Re...Restricted Usage? Real World Contracts (Score:4, Informative)
This doesn't make the U.S. the hub for all music. In fact, there is a considerable amount of international music that never makes it to the States. There are even bands from Canada that don't make it to the U.S.
Re:Fuck Yeah (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Global Community, Restricted Usage? (Score:1, Informative)
Kneo24 vs Steve Jobs and RIAA not involved (Score:4, Informative)
I'd trust Steve Job's business sense over yours any day unless you've managed to start a company as successful as Apple and then managed to save it from the administrative blunders of the next few CEOs.
The iPod is now Apple's highest margin product. If they sell $2000 of computer or $2000 of iPods, they make more money on the iPods. The iPod is the most popular portable mp3 player on the planet, so Apple must be doing something right with their sales strategies.
The majority of your 99 cents goes to the RIAA. I highly doubt that the RIAA trickles any of that money down to the labels who will spread it out amongst their artists.
The RIAA's cut is exactly $0.00. The money goes to the label, whose job it is to pay the artists. If an artist doesn't want to deal with a big label, they can always use CDBaby and put their music on the iTMS and get a very large cut of the profits.
Re:Fuck Yeah (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Water Purifiers (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's a technique that has been tested in some of the worst African "shit holes", and produces drinkable water which may not be Evian, but is significantly safer than the alternatives (drinking untreated water).
In most of Africa, electrical means are simply not an option. Sol-air, on the other hand, needs nothing except empty plastic bottles, sunlight (not even direct sunlight), and time. There is no reason why you couldn't build large-scale sol-air purifiers, only it hardly seems worthwhile when you can just as well lay a thousand bottles out on the ground.
And as what is "obvious", I was born in Africa, grew up there, am married to a Congolese woman, and have spent much time in Congo, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Angola, Burkina Faso, Togo, and a few other places that I thankfully forget. Since you asked.
Here is one link [survivalistbooks.com] on sol-air, there are others if you care to research this.
iTunes does *NOT* require an iPod! (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't accurate. I installed Itunes a week ago on my Win2k laptop. I've downloaded about fifty songs (mostly old tunes I loved as a kid), and played them a lot. I don't own an iPod. I don't even own a Macintosh, although that will probably change when I buy my next laptop.
Further, people who have CD burners can burn purchased songs from iTunes onto an Audio CD that will play in any CD player. I *think* the software limits you to making only ten CDs for each tune, but as far as I know that's the only limit.
Apple apparently is using iTunes to sell iPods, but you definitely don't need an iPod to use and benefit from the iTunes service.
Re:Jobs other companies.. (Score:2, Informative)
not
Rip. Mix. Burn. Distribute on a P2P Network.
If the R/W/B campaign indicates piracy to you, that says more about you than it does Steve Jobs.
Re:Bah (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe I shouldn't have provided that figure for the lazy people, since you missed the point. I'll spell it out for you: iPods make up 80% of *all* of the hardware mp3-type players out there. You're right, there are hundreds of *kinds* of players, but guess what - only Joe Shmoe runs ShmoeMP3, only Bob Dobbs runs DobbAmp v2.0, etc. Factor out all those, and you've got iTunes for Mac, iTunes for Windows, WinAmp, WMPlayer, and Real Player. 2 of those software players play the AAC files that are used on the #1 dominant hardware player, the iPod... which was the point of my link. I don't give a crap about the software, we're talking hardware, particularly since the software is all free - it's the hardware, and the money you pay into it, that lock you into a solution.
Here's another take - look at the Dell player. It can't play the open-standard MPEG-4 audio files that the #1 dominant player, with 80% of the market can play. Instead, it plays some sort of closed-standard proprietary WMA files (and the MP3 and WAV which both can play. No AAC, though).
Again, yes, 80% of the hardware players out there can play AAC files. Give it a year or two, and 19% of the rest will be able to, too, with firmware updates. That's the nice part of open-standards like MPEG-4.
Surely you're joking. A Bad Guy would just burn the CD once with iTunes. After that, iTunes' limitations and the concept of "playlists" would be irrelevant, because the information would be in an unprotected format. They could then make 10000 copies of the CD, or re-rip it and upload it to a p2p network. He's slightly inconvenienced by the burning step, but that's something he only goes through once per 10000 copies.
Re-ripping takes time. Nonetheless, yes, once the "bad guy" has the Redbook CD, he can put it into a high-speed mass-duplicator and burn away. I fail to see how this reflects poorly on AAC or iTunes.
Now look at what a Good Guy goes through: suppose he has a portable player that doesn't know how to play files downloaded from iTunes (as is the case for every single portable player on the market, with the exception one single product: the iPod).
When you say it like that, you're putting horrible spin on your argument. "Every single portable player on the market, with the exception of one single product: the iPod". Come on now. As I've said, and as I showed in that link you never clicked, 80% of the marketshare belongs to iPod. So, let's just revise and continue:
Now look at what a Good Guy goes through: suppose he has a portable player that doesn't know how to play files downloaded from iTunes (such as one of the many players that collectively make up 20% of the market, but individually only account for a few percent each).
He uses iTunes to burn a CDR, then rips the CDR, then encodes it into whatever format his player knows how to play. He's using up a CDR every time he wants to do this, just so he can make one transcoded (with artifacts thanks to twice-lossy encoding) copy of the song. He'll probably do it in batches (10 or so songs per CDR) so he doesn't use CDRs so fast. You don't see this as inconvenient?
Not terribly because...
I guess it might not be too bad, if you can virtualize the burn-to-CD part to not actually have to use physical media. (I haven't checked to see if this is possible.) If you can "burn" to an ISO image file on hard disk, then it'll be merely stupid, and only slightly (but still gratuitously) inconvenient
Yes, you can. Right within iTunes, in fact. There's a "convert to..." selector that converts the track and resaves it on the hard drive. No CDs necessary.
-T
Re:Hardly an Invention (Score:3, Informative)
This one [sanyousa.com], these two [panasonic.com], this one [dealtime.com] (and probably most of Creative's new portable adio).
I'm sure there's a lot more. AAC is an open format, it's based on MPEG4 and the licensing fees are nothing like WMA.