Posts Tagged ‘ iTunes ’
Posted over in Engadget, the iPod Touch was loaded with software that will help you with your marksmanship. Just fill in the blanks to know the changes that wind, weather and distance will make to your shots and fire away.
Now available in the iTunes App store so no jail breaking is required.
Yes that’s right! Free your music! No more DRM on all songs on the iTunes Store. It’s taken them a while to get there though. Amazon was among the first to sell DRM free songs and it has now arrived at the iTunes store with a cost.
It will cost each user ¢30 a song to “remove” the DRM. It’s actually downloading the DRM one and overwriting the old DRMed version. According to Tech Crunch, it will cost users $1.8 Billion to do where the math is based on the number of songs sold multplied by .30 and thus we have the = music lable tax to set their music free.
Too bad. The tax will still wont save the music industry.
Music subscriptions don’t work. Honestly now. How can I tell? Why is iTunes still the number one music e-tailer? Because you buy music and not rent them. It’s not an apartment and that’s exactly what they want us gamers to do. Rent music to play on our Guitar Hero since they’re not making enough money.
This isn’t some MMO that the whole game is online and runs on huge server farms in some secret data center. This is a music game where we buy music and we own them and play with them FOREVER! Is it because with every new version of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, essentially we already bought the music so it’s just fair that they make the efforts to port it to the next version? Thus not making money on the same consumer of the product.
Gamers shouldn’t support this. This is insane and ridiculous. People buy music and not rent them.
Just a day before the Wall Street meltdown, electronics retailer Best Buy acquires beleaguered online music company, Napster for $121 million.
Napster was originally the hotbed of peer to peer music sharing which got sued to death by the record labels ushering in the music industry into the digital age. A current era which they are still powerless to resist. Apple came into the picture by offering the iTunes Music store and 99¢ a song which they willingly gave thinking that Apple can never make this work where they have failed. Apparently they were wrong.
Fast forward years later, Napster was revived as a legal music store in an attempt to make its once “music stealers” into “music buyers” apparently didn’t pan out. iTunes holds 70% of the online music business as well as the music players that play them. Amazon is also in the mix with their DRM-free music and even more following suit.
What does Best Buy hope to make with this acquisition? Napster as a brand is not synonymous with “online music store”, Apple has done a very good job of doing that. It would have been better for Best Buy to have created their own music store instead of getting a “has been” brand with losses since its inception and a bad reputation for once being the center of all pirated music in the internet.
At the end of the day, it’s their money.
The events reach full circle with NBC returning to the iTunes store. Consumers win, everybody wins!
It doesn’t make any sense for any owner of a product to limit the sale to just a few stores with not that many customers. It was only inevitable that they return to the Apple store.
Now everybody is happy.
Months after NBC bailed out of iTunes they start selling their content on the Zune marketplace for also $1.99. But the difference they say is that NBC was given more options regarding their pricing.
Good for them they finally found a place that will sell their content. Now who’s going to buy it?
Well all I can say is. “I told you so.”
It is inevitable for media companies not to support iTunes or any other content distributor if they are bothered by the massive market share of iTunes. I’d prefer it that all content providers just sell their stuff everywhere and there are formats available for almost every major device. Then that would make all the difference.
NBC’s Zucker hints at return to iTunes? – Engadget
It hasn’t even been six months it’s been reported that NBC “may” return to iTunes. Things look bleak in Hollywood lately, the writers are on strike, that means no new shows or even movies this season so this news brings some small comfort to consumers. Could their shows have been torrented more when they left? Or was it the record earning announcement? In any case, I do hope that they resolve this soon.
Amazon MP3 store to spread DRM-free love global in 2008 – Engadget
In what could be the biggest threat the Apple iTunes store could face is this announcement by Amazon to be able to sell music anywhere in the world DRM free. But how anywhere is anywhere?
One of the biggest flaws of the iTunes store in my opinion is the limited number of countries who have it. Basically it’s just the US, EU and Japan. Apparently other countries in Asia do not need a store where officials say piracy is rampant. The limited capacity of iTunes to sell music to other countries is based on the limited rights they have with the recording company. This resulted in the varied pricing models seen in EU which practically has separate iTunes stores per country.
Unfortunately the DRM imposed by the music labels on online merchants has caused the dominance of iTunes. They wanted music that is secure enough and one way to do that is to limit the hardware where the music can be played and embed security all over it. They thought it wouldn’t last. They were apparently wrong in their projections.
Now that they want a piece of the cake, Apple will not give in. There is no way that Apple was going to raise prices or even lower prices for songs. So they allowed Amazon now to sell DRM-free music. Just to get back at Apple. Childish.
Consumers hate complicated things. It just used to be a CD from the store that can play in any player. That is the model that Amazon is exploring with their online store. I love music. I buy my music legally. Sometimes it’s expensive but I take the effort to bring it in to my iPod. I buy from the iTunes store because I like it. I like the simplicity that I can buy music and sync it to my iPod. Or even better, buy music from my iPod and play it on my iPod right now.
These are things that consumers want. DRM free music is something that consumers want. But I still want it on my iPod.
It has leaked outside that iTunes movie rentals will be announced at Macworld in San Francisco this January. This joins the news of an updated iPhone (3G for Asia?) and the ultra portable mac book.
If the rumors are to be believed, and if I understand it correctly, people who buy FOX studio movies will be able to download without added cost the digital version off the iTunes store. Or as the headline says, will be able to download the latest video releases from FOX.
In any case both of these features are interesting but we will have to wait until January 15 for any of these stories to be confirmed.
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Procrastinating in the Heat 