monkinetic weblog

Steve Ivy's Weblog - Since 1999 - XII Ed.

Apple Music News: Acquire

Napster, KaZaA. Convenient but is stealing.

No legal alternative.

What about PressPlay or Rhapsody? Subscription and limited. Boo!!

"These services treat you like a criminal." Subscriptions are the wrong path. We've bought our music for as long as we can remember – we want to own the music.

Apple Music Store. Music downloads done right. Need broad right set of rights from music companies.

Talked to Warner, then Universal… landmark deals with big 5.

200,000 tracks. Unlimited CD burns for personal use. Unlimited number of iPods. Up to 3 Macs. "Authorized"

Unlimited use in applications (iMovie, iPhoto, etc.)

$0.99/song, no subscription fee.

Details: 128kb AAC, some donw from master tapes.

Free 30sec. preview of every song in the store, in same 128kb encoding.

Album cover art.

One-click downloads, Search, Browsing – Genre Artist Album)

Exclusive tracks – U2, eminem, Bob Dylan.

iTunes Music Store – built into iTunes.

Demo: Wow.

Question: Can independents get on this service? If Apple wants to kick ass, make it easy for independent artists to sign up and sell their music.

My name is Steve Ivy and I write about technology, the open web, social software, and general nerdity on monkinetic.com. You should follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog if you like what you're reading. I spend my days hacking Movable Type, python, Django, and various other efforts at Wallrazer. This is my personal site.