AAC is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Does that really make it some alien format that no one had ever heard of? Also, AAC is more open and less proprietary than MP3.
His name is ascii, after all. If he ever gets it he should change his name to Unicode or UTF-8.
Yes, they should have leveraged that. Now they are stuck with music players which hardly sell, and an online store that is loosing out to all competitors.
Amazon uses MP3 and they are the ones scared Apple enough to lower their prices.
And when you're making something new, part of the battle is explaining it to people. And since most people already knew what MP3 was, they should have leveraged that, instead of futher complicating things by changing the format on people. And then to add insult to injury they add DRM which is a whole other layer of conceptual complexity. It's a wonder it took off at all.
Yeah, the iTMS is just sooo complex because they used AAC. If only Apple had used MP3, they could have been the biggest online music retailer in the world. Oh, wait.. they are anyway.
And, of course, it wasn't Apple that insisted on DRM. Precious little good the music store would be with no one willing to put their music in it for sale.
Interestingly, some of the record labels mentioned in the article (Beggars and The Orchard come to mind right offhand) have been available on eMusic for quite some time, in MP3 format, for as low as $0.25/track IIRC. Seeing that iTunes is a household name and eMusic is relatively unknown, I'd say Apple made the right decision to get the studios on board and use DRM.
Great argument! You just stated that change brings complications and so we stay away from it. Apple is a witch, we should burn it to the ground!
Or, since the codec required DRM by the RIAA, had less licensing fees than MP3, is better quality than MP3 and--most importantly--was invisible to the user when paired with an iPod that there were many reasons to go to AAC.
And yet some people are still buying VHS tapes of the latest movies. While AAC might be newer and better, mp3 is known to the average (read: dumb) consumer. Try to tell that person about AAC and they will likely go all glassy eyed just as if you're talking about HDCP or DRM.
Great argument! You just stated that change brings complications and so we stay away from it. Apple is a witch, we should burn it to the ground!
I'm just saying you ease people in to things. Who knows how much bigger they could have been by now if they had started out non-DRM MP3. CDs might be obsolete by now.
His name is ascii, after all. If he ever gets it he should change his name to Unicode or UTF-8.
And if you were trying to explain character encoding to someone would you teach them ascii first and then utf-8, or would you just jump right in to the variable number of bytes per character that is utf-8?
Who knows how much bigger they could have been by now if they had started out non-DRM MP3.
How about it not existing at all. Apple had to fight with the major labels (read: RIAA) for years over subscription verse purchasing before they even allowed Apple to sell their music. Without DRM there would be no major labels and therefore no real interest in the iTunes Store.
DRM free is how it should have been from the beginning. And it should have been MP3 not some alien format no one had ever heard of.
i agree. mp3 is the "lowest common denominator" and normal people (read: not us, appleinsider geeks, gizmodo readers, etc) understand it.
for normal people ipod = mp3 player. amazon was wise enough to notice that people "just get" mp3s and appropriately called their store "amazon mp3" (but even them, i think they offer other formats).... my point is, unprotected mp3s should ALWAYS be a choice on the menu because the format is popular, regardless of other technical considerations.
It doesn't matter what the "official" standards are, when you're rolling ou something new you want to be as simple as possible, and that means using the defacto standard
Later, once people are used to it, and understand and have experience with music downloads as such, then introduce things such as superior codecs and other options.
It really doesn't matter. iPods played MP3 all along, from the very beginning. There was no store in the beginning, it was just iPod. Legal sales of DRM-free tracks from the major labels simply wasn't going to happen five years ago. It doesn't matter what the market demand was, the labels just weren't going to provide it, there is no legal way for Apple to force them to say otherwise. As long as they were required to do DRM, then they can use the best codec available to go with it. Only five years later are they willing to try to sell without DRM, but this is, as far as I can tell, only two of the four major labels and many indies that offer DRM-free download tracks, so there's still some work to be done.
I think it's possible or even likely that how Apple did it was the way to get the labels to open up in the first place. Either way, we're gradually getting what we want. I doubt the labels would have done this without significant economic pressure from Apple's system.
No. Because it was something new, a paid download store.
And when you're making something new, part of the battle is explaining it to people. And since most people already knew what MP3 was, they should have leveraged that, instead of futher complicating things by changing the format on people. And then to add insult to injury they add DRM which is a whole other layer of conceptual complexity. It's a wonder it took off at all.
So, you're saying that because Apple used a little known format, and had to explain why they thought it was better, rather than going for the much more widely used MPG format, they were never able to make a success of it?
I suppose you have a point. If they had used MPG, the itunes store, as well as the players might have bcome more popular.
Everything is how it should be from the beginning. It's just about money. Not about what's right. If we were talking about what's right, then we would be offered several different bitrates to download including lossless.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ascii
DRM free is how it should have been from the beginning. And it should have been MP3 not some alien format no one had ever heard of.
throughout all of this no one has mentioned any iTunes stores except the US one. i cant understand what is happening on the UK store, since this morning the iTunes Plus section has been closed (giving 'could not complete' errors) and when you try to buy an iTunes Plus song it says the item is being updated....thats a whole day (and possibly more) of lost iTunes Plus sales in at least one country which is a real pain to me right now as i need to download a Plus album, it seems it really isnt as simple as flicking a switch.
What is interesting is UK price updates, it would be sooooo cruel for Apple to make the US Plus store cheaper and not change any others, well.......since this morning some iTunes Plus tracks have been displaying a price of 79p, the same as non-iTunes Plus tracks, BUT i would say the slight majority of tracks still bear the 99p price tag, is it really going to be left like that!?!? meaning you would pay the same in cents as you would in pence for an iTunes Plus track? and i hope they dont try and pull the 'its harder to sell stuff in the UK and it costs more and anything outside the US is hard to do" when the biggest iTunes Plus label, EMI, is based in London, dont get me wrong i love iTunes and Apple but they trump up the international bilge stuff all the time
Factory car stereos may support MP3 but usually not AAC, after-market car stereos usually support MP3 and it's a crapshoot between WMA or AAC support or neither.
Nearly every major car stereo manufacturer offers models that will playback .m4a files recorded onto CD in a data format. This includes Pioneer, Sony, Alpine, Kenwood, Clarion, Panasonic, and JVC.
It's pretty clear that when Apple started iTunes Plus with EMI, the agreement was to charge higher prices to the consumer (and EMI charged Apple more). But when others (Universal and the independents) charged less to Amazon, EMI had to match it. After that, EMI couldn't charge Apple more than they charged Amazon (and more than the independents would charge Apple), so EMI lowered the cost to Apple.
Do you really think Apple was making the extra .30 per song? I would guess maybe .05 at most.
Apple negotiated the original deal with EMI many months ago. I don't think Amazon could ever have done this themselves. At the time, Jobs said he wanted to have 50% of iTunes songs DRM-free by the end of the year. It looks like right now it's around 33%.
Comments
Whatever it is you are on, come off it.
AAC is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Does that really make it some alien format that no one had ever heard of? Also, AAC is more open and less proprietary than MP3.
His name is ascii, after all. If he ever gets it he should change his name to Unicode or UTF-8.
Yes, they should have leveraged that. Now they are stuck with music players which hardly sell, and an online store that is loosing out to all competitors.
Amazon uses MP3 and they are the ones scared Apple enough to lower their prices.
And when you're making something new, part of the battle is explaining it to people. And since most people already knew what MP3 was, they should have leveraged that, instead of futher complicating things by changing the format on people. And then to add insult to injury they add DRM which is a whole other layer of conceptual complexity. It's a wonder it took off at all.
Yeah, the iTMS is just sooo complex because they used AAC. If only Apple had used MP3, they could have been the biggest online music retailer in the world. Oh, wait.. they are anyway.
And, of course, it wasn't Apple that insisted on DRM. Precious little good the music store would be with no one willing to put their music in it for sale.
Interestingly, some of the record labels mentioned in the article (Beggars and The Orchard come to mind right offhand) have been available on eMusic for quite some time, in MP3 format, for as low as $0.25/track IIRC. Seeing that iTunes is a household name and eMusic is relatively unknown, I'd say Apple made the right decision to get the studios on board and use DRM.
So.. are you saying YOU are no-one?
So.. are you saying you don't know what a figure of speech is?
Great argument! You just stated that change brings complications and so we stay away from it. Apple is a witch, we should burn it to the ground!
Or, since the codec required DRM by the RIAA, had less licensing fees than MP3, is better quality than MP3 and--most importantly--was invisible to the user when paired with an iPod that there were many reasons to go to AAC.
And yet some people are still buying VHS tapes of the latest movies. While AAC might be newer and better, mp3 is known to the average (read: dumb) consumer. Try to tell that person about AAC and they will likely go all glassy eyed just as if you're talking about HDCP or DRM.
Great argument! You just stated that change brings complications and so we stay away from it. Apple is a witch, we should burn it to the ground!
I'm just saying you ease people in to things. Who knows how much bigger they could have been by now if they had started out non-DRM MP3. CDs might be obsolete by now.
His name is ascii, after all. If he ever gets it he should change his name to Unicode or UTF-8.
And if you were trying to explain character encoding to someone would you teach them ascii first and then utf-8, or would you just jump right in to the variable number of bytes per character that is utf-8?
Who knows how much bigger they could have been by now if they had started out non-DRM MP3.
How about it not existing at all. Apple had to fight with the major labels (read: RIAA) for years over subscription verse purchasing before they even allowed Apple to sell their music. Without DRM there would be no major labels and therefore no real interest in the iTunes Store.
DRM free is how it should have been from the beginning. And it should have been MP3 not some alien format no one had ever heard of.
i agree. mp3 is the "lowest common denominator" and normal people (read: not us, appleinsider geeks, gizmodo readers, etc) understand it.
for normal people ipod = mp3 player. amazon was wise enough to notice that people "just get" mp3s and appropriately called their store "amazon mp3" (but even them, i think they offer other formats).... my point is, unprotected mp3s should ALWAYS be a choice on the menu because the format is popular, regardless of other technical considerations.
It doesn't matter what the "official" standards are, when you're rolling ou something new you want to be as simple as possible, and that means using the defacto standard
Later, once people are used to it, and understand and have experience with music downloads as such, then introduce things such as superior codecs and other options.
It really doesn't matter. iPods played MP3 all along, from the very beginning. There was no store in the beginning, it was just iPod. Legal sales of DRM-free tracks from the major labels simply wasn't going to happen five years ago. It doesn't matter what the market demand was, the labels just weren't going to provide it, there is no legal way for Apple to force them to say otherwise. As long as they were required to do DRM, then they can use the best codec available to go with it. Only five years later are they willing to try to sell without DRM, but this is, as far as I can tell, only two of the four major labels and many indies that offer DRM-free download tracks, so there's still some work to be done.
I think it's possible or even likely that how Apple did it was the way to get the labels to open up in the first place. Either way, we're gradually getting what we want. I doubt the labels would have done this without significant economic pressure from Apple's system.
No. Because it was something new, a paid download store.
And when you're making something new, part of the battle is explaining it to people. And since most people already knew what MP3 was, they should have leveraged that, instead of futher complicating things by changing the format on people. And then to add insult to injury they add DRM which is a whole other layer of conceptual complexity. It's a wonder it took off at all.
So, you're saying that because Apple used a little known format, and had to explain why they thought it was better, rather than going for the much more widely used MPG format, they were never able to make a success of it?
I suppose you have a point. If they had used MPG, the itunes store, as well as the players might have bcome more popular.
DRM free is how it should have been from the beginning. And it should have been MP3 not some alien format no one had ever heard of.
What is interesting is UK price updates, it would be sooooo cruel for Apple to make the US Plus store cheaper and not change any others, well.......since this morning some iTunes Plus tracks have been displaying a price of 79p, the same as non-iTunes Plus tracks, BUT i would say the slight majority of tracks still bear the 99p price tag, is it really going to be left like that!?!? meaning you would pay the same in cents as you would in pence for an iTunes Plus track? and i hope they dont try and pull the 'its harder to sell stuff in the UK and it costs more and anything outside the US is hard to do" when the biggest iTunes Plus label, EMI, is based in London, dont get me wrong i love iTunes and Apple but they trump up the international bilge stuff all the time
i my point is, unprotected mp3s should ALWAYS be a choice on the menu because the format is popular, regardless of other technical considerations.
Have Apple ever sold the consumer what they think they want?
/Adrian
YES...and Steve Jobs should have hired YOU to go into those conference rooms to negotiate such a deal with the record labels.
Thanks Amazon.
Yes, thanks Amazon. I'd like to see Apple lower their DRM'd music to 89 cents too.
Factory car stereos may support MP3 but usually not AAC, after-market car stereos usually support MP3 and it's a crapshoot between WMA or AAC support or neither.
Nearly every major car stereo manufacturer offers models that will playback .m4a files recorded onto CD in a data format. This includes Pioneer, Sony, Alpine, Kenwood, Clarion, Panasonic, and JVC.
Do you really think Apple was making the extra .30 per song? I would guess maybe .05 at most.
Apple negotiated the original deal with EMI many months ago. I don't think Amazon could ever have done this themselves. At the time, Jobs said he wanted to have 50% of iTunes songs DRM-free by the end of the year. It looks like right now it's around 33%.