Monday, 04/28/03

So, Apple released iTunes 4 today, along with the company's long-leaked online music service, the iTunes Music Store. First question: how do I change the iTunes font back to whatever it was before?

Writing in Fortune, Devin Leonard's writeup of Apple's new offerings was timed to coincide with their release. The article answers some questions and raises some more.

The Fortune piece makes a lot of noise about how albums are fuddy-duddy and singles are what's happening. Sure, Apple's new service makes acquiring individual tracks drop-dead simple, and Jobs thinks "most consumers of popular music" will buy and assemble mixes of singles. The only voice in favor of albums as an artistic unit comes from Trent Reznor, which makes me think Leonard doesn't take the idea too seriously.

Me, I'm with Trent, and what I haven't seen widely reported about the new service is that album pricing is available. The only price I've seen so far is $9.99 (two-disc albums $19.98). For an eight-song album like Sigur Ros' "()", you'd be better off buying eight 99¢ tracks, but most new stuff with more than ten tracks easily goes for $16 and up in stores, making ten bucks a sizable markdown. This is very good.

(Oops: turns out you can't buy the eight Sigur Ros tracks individually -- only three are sold a la carte. If you want any of the other five, you've got to buy the album.)

The store's selection is a problem. I tried searching for a lot of names from my iTunes library, and came up close to empty. No Alejandro Escovedo, Magnetic Fields, Propellerheads, David Holmes, or Jack Logan. The only Aimee Mann albums they include are the two she made for Geffen. Every artist with a large back catalog had gaps, at best -- Everything But The Girl is represented by a bizarre three albums, out of the approximately eleventy-seven they've released. Some albums are incomplete, like Ivy's "Apartment Life", which I lost, and would consider buying again. I'll be curious to see how the selection situation changes.

(I initially reported they'd left out a couple of Lyle Lovett's nine albums, but it turned out I was failing to notice they stop reporting results at 100. Napster did the same thing. Bloody irritating.)

I'd think smaller labels would be all over this thing, so I'm anxiously looking forward to the verdict from the likes of Bloodshot Records or locals Loveless -- both whether Apple is showing an interest in bringing them inside the tent, and whether the economics make sense.

Based on the fuzzy writing in the Fortune article, I was concerned about the loathsome digital rights management department for most of yesterday. Downloaded songs can be burned to CDs and and synched with iPods with no real restrictions, but they can only be "played" on three computers. From the Fortune article:

... anybody who tries to upload iTunes Music Store songs onto KaZaA will be shocked. Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online. Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful.

At first I thought that sounded insane. If I conservatively buy three albums a month, and upgrade my computer every two years, after an upgrade cycle or two I'll be throwing away a thousand dollars worth of music with every hardware upgrade.

Instead, music downloads are tied to an Apple ID username/password. You "authorize" a computer with an Apple ID, after which it can play music purchased with those credentials. You can apparently "authorize" up to three computers with your credentials, and you can "deauthorize" a computer you're selling to free up a slot for another machine. Still, three seems like a low threshold -- even if you've got backups of your AAC music files, if you lose the authorized drives (through theft, loss, a dead drive, or a computer you sold but forgot to "deauthorize"), you lose your music.

Of course, it also means you can't play the AAC files unless you're using Mac OS X, though the Fortune article claims Apple will release a Windows version of iTunes, which surprised me. I'm looking forward to playing around with this, but I'll be creating a disposable Apple ID with which to do it.

PS: I call three albums a month "conservative" because I distinctly remember what happened to my music purchasing patterns the year I was using Napster most heavily. I'd buy ten albums a month without even thinking about it. I don't know anyone who thinks 128 Kbit/sec songs are worth keeping around in their own right, but as free samples, they're irresistable.

This is why I believe the music industry position that piracy is hurting their business to be specious claptrap. The Fortune article blithely takes the industry at its word, asserting, "U.S. music sales plunged 8.2% last year, largely because songs are being distributed free on the Internet through illicit file-sharing destinations." A global recession, a dearth of Britney-magnitude megahits, the industry's own decision to eliminate singles, and growing customer opposition to forty-minute $19 albums, and they blame the drop on piracy? I think it's more likely that in the last couple of years, "piracy" kept the big five from becoming the big two or three.

(Updated 4/29 to correct DRM hypothesis) 10:24PM «

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