Quote:
Originally Posted by
striker_kk 
Apple is going to lose business in this segment.
Certainly Apple must have figured out this already!!
Still they did hike the price..
Gotta love ignorance.
Apple doesn't care about content as long as their customers have access to it. This was why they created the iTunes store in the first place. It wasn't to take over the music industry. At the time there weren't any legal places to buy popular digital music for Macs. Everything was Windows only. Because no one else was willing to make anything compatible with Macs, Apple stepped in, as they usually do, and created something their customers could use. And remember this was very limited at first, which is why Steve Jobs was able to get them to all agree to their a la cart model; something that no one else had been able to do before.
No one knew what kind of monster this was going to grow into. After it was too late, the record companies realized that iTunes had grown up and become the 700 pound gorilla they are today. So, fearing of losing complete control yet again (as they did with MTV in the 80's), they decided to let others offer something extra and prevent Apple from being able to match it. The Amazon store was created with DRM-free tracks. The intention of this was not to make music buying consumers happy (a side affect), but rather to provide leverage over negotiations with Apple.
To the average ignorant consumer, this made Amazon look like the good guy and Apple appear evil, when in fact, the record companies were holding all the strings and playing them against each other. This of course created a media backlash against Apple and an obviously false perception of consumer demand; Amazon gained market share, but at the cost of Plays For Sure and Zune, while iTunes continued to maintain its market share. It got so bad that Steve Jobs had to come out publicly (once again*) against DRM and let all the whiners know that if they had the choice they would remove DRM from iTunes music... and a few months later they demonstrated that by announcing EMI's entire catalog in the iTunes Plus format. (Yes it cost 30 cents more at the time, but the proof was in the fact that Apple was accused of wanting to lock people into the iTunes+iPod ecosystem, which they clearly were not. They have always wanted a seamless experience for their customers. Perhaps if Microsoft weren't so damned greedy by locking Plays For Sure content to Windows, then there wouldn't have been a need for iTunes at all?)
*Steve Jobs once said in a Rolling Stone interview, that DRM would never really work. Someone would always find a way around it.
Well eventually Apple had to cave, because passive ignorant people aren't willing to boycott the record industry, for some reason they just have to have their music at any cost. I assume by looking at the top ten lists, most of these people are teens and don't care about politics at that age, so none of this is worth their time. (They'll pay later for it, as we are now.)
Anyway, here we are again... Amazon once again has another unequal advantage and of course it is all Apple's fault. So go ahead and run to Amazon, I don't blame you, but just remember you're proving the record industry to be correct in their assumption that consumers are like cattle and can easily be corralled and led tot he slaughter house. Personally, except a few older albums here and there, I've stopped buying music altogether. F#$K the record industry! Thank god some bands have the moxie to stand up to the industry and are starting to distribute, sell and give away their own music.
Hopefully that will be the next distribution model... "Artist Direct" where artists can submit their own content to iTunes and have Apple take a share as they do with the iPhone App Store.
