Apple Music Store Coming to Europe & iTunes in China

frankie writes "As reported everywhere, Apple is holding a press conference in London on Tuesday June 15. The entirely un-subtle official sound bite is "the biggest story in music is about to get even bigger", not what we've come to expect from Lord Steve." Or read through the Reuters report. In other news, it appears that Apple has struck a deal with China's second larger computer manufacturer to preinstall iTunes.

Re:Japan First?

[Paulrothrock]

He could release it worldwide and that would still be true. Japan is the one of the first places where it's the next day. So if he says "By 12:00AM Local time, you can buy from iTMS," Japan is still one of the first major countries that can do it. This might be a good way of distributing the demand.

Re:World’s Best Digital Music Experience

[The Lost Supertone]

You don't own an iPod do you? Fact is the experience of using the iPod is part of it, and the experience of using iTunes is part of it. Working with Audio mixing tools isn't exactly the best because you're doing all the work. You may not agree. But simply because Apple is saying they're the best doesn't mean they're Microsoftish. It means they've still got a huge ego, which is no news. Watch any MacWorld or WWDC and you'll see Steve and company have some massive ego going on. It's not so bad they do make some really great products and do stuff better than most people in the markets they enter. Apple I think entered the MP3 player market with the iPod because iTunes was going well by it'self and they were getting great feedback but the portable player market was not growing the way they saw it could. And decided to fill it. They did the same thing with the iSight recently. There are no really good web cams out there that people all want to buy to do web cam stuff. Now at least for the Mac Apple has filled that void. Apple has a mentality where they'll let a market get to some point and if nobody has taken the lead they'll just come in and blow everyone away. If you notice they have iMovie and iPhoto and yet they haven't made any ventures into the camcorder or camera markets. Why? Cause Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, HP, Kodak, Samsung, Sony, JVC, and company are all doing very good for digital stuff in these markets.

Re:Canada, too!

[proj_2501]

does it let you use the € symbol? Let's try it: €

Re:.ogg iTunes, .wav etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm. Actually, iTunes can use mp3 natively if you want it to. It can also use unprotected AAC. There is also a plugin to do Ogg with iTunes.

Don't let fears over iTunes' "incompatibility" damn you-- it's not Windows Media, with a click of a button in the preferences you can set it to encode in something you can use in any player that you prefer.

Re:More news!

[pubjames]

Well really, what _is_ the difference?

Microsoft has a monopoly. Apple doesn't.

That's it. Different rules apply if you have a monopoly. Microsoft may consider this "unfair", but there are good reasons for it.

Re:China will be an interesting experiment

[shawnce]

Just to be clear. iTMS isn't going to be in China this month, at least nothing so far points to that (or if and when it will be). All that is happening is that Apple is getting iTunes, the application, pre-bundled on computers from one major hardware vendor in China. Like it did with HP in the states (which took place before the iPod rebrand deal IIRC).

Re:ipod

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll sell less than they do in the US. Chinese GDP per head: $4,700 [cia.gov]. US GDP per head: $36,300

Now, you can bet your bottom dollar that less of the GDP in China gets back to the workers, so something maks me think that although they have 1 billion people there, not many of them will be toying with the idea of getting an iPod, iTunes or an iMac or any other Apple device...

Re:iTunes or AllOfMP3?

[pubjames]

Though AllOfMP3.com is a legally questionable operation

It's not a legally questionable operation. It is legal according to Russian law, and it's a Russian company, so it's legal.

Re:More news!

[Cereal Box]

Apple is cutting independant deals with computer manufacturers based on the quality of its product.

Money has nothing to do with it, I'm sure.

So, no, Microsoft is the only company using the leverage provided by the Windows OS monopoly.

How do you figure? Isn't Apple leveraging the enormous popularity of Windows and cheap PC prices (as opposed to Apple hardware prices, which I'm guessing don't fly so well in China) to get iTunes installed on as many Chinese computers as possible?

Again, imagine this situation: Microsoft ships Windows with no WMP, only iTunes. Again, is this wrong? Would you be complaining about this?

Microsoft is forcing computer manufacturers to ship the Windows Media Player whether they want to or not.

And they're forcing them to ship system32.dll whether the manufacturers want to or not. I've got news for you -- the only "absolutely essential" part of any OS is the kernel, the rest is all in-house apps that are effectively being "forced" on whoever is reselling the OS in the name of creating a more useful system.

Re:More news!

[Cereal Box]

Now.. when previewing a file I don't get to see solitaire or notepad as it's not actually integrated with the OS.

Notepad.exe is the default viewer for text files, it just not something you see in explorer.

And as far as media previewing goes, KDE and GNOME have similar functionality, for example. I think most users expect a modern OS to do some sort of previewing in the file manager. Microsoft has to have some sort of application for which to do the previewing, don't you think? And while it would be possible to make other media players hook into the previewing API that WMP uses, there's no guarantee, and hence with a "pluggable" previewing architecture there's no guarantee that the user will have a consistent experience with previewing (that is, no guarantee that it will always work). So, Microsoft opted to have their media player bundled to accomplish this task (and furthermore make the core parts uninstallable... makes sense). If you're really so concerned about WMP, you can easily delete the "wrapper" application, and leave just the core behind.

It's _been_ available in Europe....sort of.

[wedding]

As a test, I sent a giftcard from my account to a friend in Manchester. Worked like a charm, and he never had to use a CC (which is part of the trigger process to kill Euro users.)

ITMS has been available in Europe for a while, you just had to pay from the US.

Re:iTunes or AllOfMP3?

[pubjames]

Since presumably most of the world does not live in Russia, its legality elsewhere is still in question.

But that's a dumb argument. There are American porns sites that would be illegal in many countries in the world, but that doesn't mean that the sites are of dubious legality. They are legal. Or if you don't like that example, many American web sites share personal data in a way that is not allowed by law in the EU, but again that doesn't mean they are illegal or dubious.

I think what you mean is that it may not be legal for people in the USA to use the allofmp3 web site. That may be the case. But allofmp3 is not "a legally questionable operation", unless you believe that all American porn sites are legally questionable because they would be illegal in certain other countries.

Re:Question of the day : food or music ?

[Hackie_Chan]

...the urban population in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong live a lot like the rest of us (albeit in slightly more cramped spaces).

Not competely true. Did you only visit the places where tourists go? I've travelled all around China and believe me, and the middle class don't live as good as we do -- not at all. The only places in China where it was up-to-par compared to my home country (Sweden) was the places were tourists go.

I don't expect Apple to sell more iPods in China than the United States for quite some years.