iTunes Staffers Becomes Music's New Gatekeepers 79
WSJdpatton writes to mention The Wall Street Journal has a look at how Apple is shaking up the world of music retailing. "Apple -- now one of the largest sellers of music in the U.S. -- offers home-page placement in exchange for things such as exclusive access to new songs, special discount pricing or additional material such as interviews with stars. Most other big retailers, digital and physical, also seek exclusive offerings, but Apple is especially aggressive and has outsize clout when it comes to the slightly out-of-mainstream music it often emphasizes."
Wow... News. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
You give me something I want (exclusive offerings), I give you something you want (placement and money).
News Flash: Google provides links to sites who pay for prime placement. Scandalous footage at 11!
monopoly? hmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think they're a monopoly and couldn't become one in this space without purchasing or controlling the labels themselves. Additionally they would need to control every outlet for all of that music, not just online.
Apple isn't the first company with an online music store and they have no exclusive deal with any of the labels. Their dominance is self-reinforcing because iTunes is the only way to manage music on your iPod. Maybe that's the monopolistic part you're talking about?
How many iTunes but no iPod customers does Apple have? Likely few. Why? Because there are other ways to buy music. There are other ways to manage your music. There are other ways to listen to your music.
Competition in this space is healthy (although the Ahype around iTunes would have you believe otherwise) and there are enough competitors to offer consumers a choice in how they purchase (or not purchase but stil legally consume) music online. Even if you look at device + music store/library manager Apple isn't alone in this space. Napster has a device. Real partnered with SanDisk late last year and released the Sansa Rhapsody which works with the Rhapsody client software. You can consume that music service through other 3rd party devices like Sonos and Squeezebox. I don't think you can do that with iTunes because they keep the content locked to their devices.
So, I don't know. Yeah, they're popular with iPod users, but iTunes just isn't compelling enough to take over enough of the market by itself to be a monopoly.
Re:Sound quality (IMHO) will keep CDs around (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sound quality (IMHO) will keep CDs around (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, long story longer
Summary:
For people who use their Hi-Fi/iPod/whatever to listen to music, 128kbps AAC is probably okay, for people who user their music to listen to their Hi-Fi it certainly isn't!
Me, I mainly buy CDs now just because I like to have them on show on the shelf. Heck, half the time I come to changing the CDs in the car changer I burn them from my iTunes library, especially if there is something specific I want to put in there.
We need gatekeepers (Score:3, Insightful)
The amount of stuff being produced these days for a consumer would easily overwhelm a consumer with even above-average patience and attention span. This is true in not just music, but in many other sectors/industries (cars, home electronics are other examples).
So, somebody needs to be the "gatekeepers" — we are happy to employ them to avoid missing on the good new stuff while not spending all our time weeding out the bad new stuff. The question is only, who should that be.
In medicines, which we deemed to be too important, we have FDA [fda.gov] — a government agency. In everything else there are competing outlets, some of them commercial (think CNet [cnet.com]), some not (think Consumer Reports [consumerreports.org]).
The following is a simple truism, but it is needed to counter the article's implicit disapproval: Apple got there, because consumers of music like the work, Apple's experts are doing.
Maybe, it is the dissatisfaction with radio jockeys (think "Payola" [wikipedia.org]), or with MTV, who, presumably, are losing their music gatekeeping role to Apple — I don't know. But should Apple become thought of as abusive of its position, people will switch to others — competition, as is often said, is only a click away.
Re:Wow... News. (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I suppose I'm hardly shocked they'd do it this way. The music business isn't exactly known for its care or thought of the consumer.
Re:Apple: a monopoly... doing good? (Score:5, Insightful)
It took over three years of negotiations with the major record labels for Apple to get them to agree to any sort of contract, and when the iTunes Music Store was introduced, Steve Jobs gave a number of fairly candid interviews of how he had to (1) convince the major labels that music could be sold digitally, (2) how he loss the argument on no DRM, but won massive concessions on insuring that consumer 'fair use' rights weren't decimated by the major labels, when it came to what control the labels wanted DRM to provide, (3) how he also won major concessions on pricing, but loss some control over contracting issues, and (4) how his goal to insure that the major record labels and independent labels all expect the same treatment contract wise, was somewhat lessened by the aforementioned pricing and 'fair play' wars. [Independent Labels got a good contract, but its not equal with the Big 5, as was originally pushed for, and this was a direct power push by the Major labels, since they couldn't control product placement]
This was a 3 year battle, as opposed to those outfits who rushed out the gate after Apple introduced iTMS. Remember BuyMusic. It died quickly and horribly, but I can't say it wasn't a deserving death. To be the first to introduce purchasing downloads for the major labels to Windows users, [in case you forgot, Apple originally won all those concessions and spent three years in contract and business meeting just to get a trial run on the Macintosh platform], BuyMusic conceded to tier pricing, purchased placement of artists, super restrict and adjustable DRM on song files (some songs could be shared on multiple computers (2 to 5 depending on the label and artist), some could not, some songs couldn't be purchased as singles at all, new releases prices occasionally went as high as $1.79 with no copy, no portability restrictions in place.
I say, spending more than 3 years arguing, cajoling, and gaining concessions for consumer rights, when so many others were so willing to trample all over them, just to gain access to the major record labels collections, is ample argument that Steve Jobs and Apple has always seen DRM as a deterrent to where their vision of digital media will be in the future. That said, I think Apple was very pleased with their DRM, with all the latitudes it allowed, despite what the majors wanted. There is a reason why it's called, "FairPlay". The name is like a slap in the face reminder to the majors that consumers have rights as well; and Apple will do its best to protect them.
Unfortunately, I think Apple felt the sting of their own DRM and negotiated concessions, far more rapidly than they anticipated. So even the glow of their freshly minted FairPlay didn't generate illusions of DRM's not so bad for too long. Less you forget, when facing contract negotiations for extending FairPlay to Windows, and renewing contracts with the majors, Apple had to limit 'Rendezvous', add reductions to the number of times a play list could be burned, and make other concessions to the Major Labels; all because their contract indicated that if FairPlay was cracked and not fixed in a specific timeframe, the majors had some say in what they consider reparations.