930 Forums
=> GENERAL DISCUSSION => Topic started by: markie on February 19, 2004, 11:56:00 am
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Despite Vansmack's argument of brand recognition:
Napster losing money, top executives
February 19 - 10:44 EST The San Jose Mercury News reports that Napster is losing both money and top management, including its president, chief financial officer, vice president of programming and head of corporate communications as well a key board member. Roxio also began laying off workers this week at the Napster division, which lost US$15 million in its first two months of operation. In addition, the newspaper said Hewlett-Packard was originally supposed to partner with Napster and install a link to the Napster online music service on its computers. However, that deal fell through, and in January Apple and HP announced a strategic agreement to produce an HP-branded iPod and add an iTunes link to HP desktops and laptops.
From macminute.com
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I have no idea or perspective as to whether this is good, bad or indifferent.
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the real problem here is, its not free.
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Aw, you mean you might actually have to go to the music shop to buy your cd's?
Pitty, pitty, pitty....
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freedom is not free.
If you like itunes store, its probably a good thing. If you, as a consumer, prefer choice it is a bad thing.
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Originally posted by mankie:
Aw, you mean you might actually have to go to the music shop to buy your cd's?
Pitty, pitty, pitty....
i work in one, remember? I was just making a statement.
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Originally posted by sonickteam2:
Pitty, pitty, pitty....
i work in one, remember? I was just making a statement. [/QB][/QUOTE]
But you dont like your job, right?
How else could you advocate Napster giving away free downloads?
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
But you dont like your job, right?
How else could you advocate Napster giving away free downloads?
I dont believe i was advocating anything was i? I just stated that that was the reason they were losing money.
I dont like my job, because i get paid $6/hour and they keep scheduling me on Friday nights. The work i do there is fine, and i love to be in the store and talk music with the people there.
I never used Napster when it was free.
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Originally posted by sonickteam2:
Originally posted by mankie:
Aw, you mean you might actually have to go to the music shop to buy your cd's?
Pitty, pitty, pitty....
i work in one, remember? I was just making a statement. [/b]
My comment was a general one, not for you in particular.
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Originally posted by Bags:
I have no idea or perspective as to whether this is good, bad or indifferent.
it means that users aren't willing to cough up an extra $10 or so to be able to get access to full length song streams verses 30 second samples. napster was treating to create a community where users could share playlists and than pay the .99 per song download is they what they heard. in part in means that itunes is more successful because it doesn't have all the "value-added" features, and it was one of first out of the box to provide hit songs for individual download.
personally i still think .99 a track is to high and avoid itunes, etc like the plaque.
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sonick,
Sorry if this is common knowledge, but which store do you work in?
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Originally posted by sonickteam2:
I dont like my job, because i get paid $6/hour and they keep scheduling me on Friday nights. [/QB]
Sounds like you got a raise, congrats!!!!!
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Originally posted by mankie:
Originally posted by sonickteam2:
Originally posted by mankie:
Aw, you mean you might actually have to go to the music shop to buy your cd's?
Pitty, pitty, pitty....
i work in one, remember? I was just making a statement. [/b]
My comment was a general one, not for you in particular. [/b]
thats kinda what i figured. :)
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Originally posted by bellenseb:
sonick,
Sorry if this is common knowledge, but which store do you work in?
record and tape traders. and no, guiny, i didnt get a raise, its really $5.75, i just rounded up, lol.
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I've heard good things about R&TT, but I've never been to one. What's the closest one to DC? Any chance of a DC/VA location?
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Originally posted by bellenseb:
I've heard good things about R&TT, but I've never been to one. What's the closest one to DC? Any chance of a DC/VA location?
none in DC yet. all in the Bmore area. Severna Park or Annapolis are the closest to DC.
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Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
personally i still think .99 a track is to high and avoid itunes, etc like the plaque.
Yeah, I agree that .99 a song is too much, but I don't think $10 per album is too bad, esp. when I feel like making an impulse buy. I just got tired of f***ing with kazaa and the like, getting songs with less than stellar audio quality, having to constantly fix up the id3 tags etc.
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I like to physically own the CD. I think that makes me a dinosaur.
but for people who are not, I think itunes store is pretty cool. It makes a lot of sense. Being able to get individual tracks for 99 cents is great. It is much better than having to hunt down some rare overpriced CD single, or get an album you do not really want.
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i'm with markie on this one... i would never spend $10 to buy impulsevily buy the electronic version of an album. for that much money i want the physical product.
emusic is still best us based mp3 provider. for a $3.33 I can get a 15 track album. the problem is those bastards keep adding great new music and 90 tracks a month only go so far.
if you are willing to dip your toe in the legalities of russian copywrite law, allofmp3 is one way to go. instead of paying per song you pay per megabyte downloaded. and you can get songs in a wide variety of formats and compression levels.
emusic is tied to the per track restriction because songwriters get paid the same regardless of if the track one minute or nine minutes long.
personally, i would like to see a music library scenario. where i can checkout the entire record listen to it for a week and decide whether not i want to keep it. and be given the option to buy the physical product at the end of the loan period.
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
I like to physically own the CD.
I couldnt agree with you more.....and wont from now on. But i do have to have the cd.
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Originally posted by Rob_Gee_a.k.a _Guiny:
Originally posted by mark e smith:
I like to physically own the CD.
I couldnt agree with you more.....and wont from now on. But i do have to have the cd. [/b]
For me it depends really. Sometimes I don't really care about the physical product. To date I've bought 5 albums off of itunes. All of them so far have been new releases by new bands. I guess that when it's a band I've listened to a while and have some sort of emotional attachment to I'm more likely to want the physical product. I dunno.
Also, probably 80% of the music I listen to is via the ipod, whether at home, in the car or whatever, and since i've gotten strung out on that thing the physical cd's just seem less important than they used to.
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See, I fall smack dab in the middle. I used to think owning the CD was a must, but recently, with all the burned copies of things floating through my life, I couldn't care less. In truth, if it is a CD I really want, I'll buy the real deal somewhere. Otherwise, i'll try new music, or fill in my back catalog stuff on burned CDs all day. Though, it does make my CD collection look less impressive. and isn't that what its all about anyway?
I swore I'd never pay for music over the net. But I did just purchase the sigur ros ep. $3.00 for an ep makes itunes worthwhile. And I agree with Markie, to find a hard to get single, it makes sense. And an album for $10 is still cheaper that anything this side of a used CD. I just don't care about the booklets, they are often lame anyway.
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i was spoiled by the formerly "unlimited" download policy of emusic, so my sense of what the cost of an electronic version of an album is skewed.
personally, i feel insulted by being charged for $10 for downloading a album, given the fact that for not much more i can get the physical product. but if the download cost half as much as the cd, it would be more attractive.
secret machines have an interesting offer at the moment... for 8.91 you can download their new cd, which isn't due out for awhile, they'll also send you a six song sampler of other bands and a custom cdr to burn the cd to. is the wave of the future?
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The stuff I download tends to be live shows, demos, and other commercially unreleased stuff. I also download a fair amount of rare singles and import bonus tracks. That was always a huge gyp for the American music fan, shelling out 12 bucks for one extra track on an import single or 35 for one extra track on a japanese import, and I have no remorse about downloading those tracks for free.
However, I feel bad downloading whole albums and I still love buying a physical CD. The handful of times I've DLed whole albums have been when one of my favorite artists' new albums surfaced before the record was released. But every time I felt guilty and bought the physical copy when it came out.
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Originally posted by bellenseb:
That was always a huge gyp for the American music fan
uk artists often put extra tracks on their us releases, so it all evens out
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Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
i was spoiled by the formerly "unlimited" download policy of emusic, so my sense of what the cost of an electronic version of an album is skewed.
But emusic had to change because it was not viable.
It was good in some ways and terrible in others. Concentrating on the bad.....It was never going to be more than a niche service because it never had "top 50 artists" on it. Plus I have several albums missing tracks that I tried downloading 5 times or more.
We have had this debate so many times.....
iTunes overcomes those 3 flaws, but is more expensive. You get what you pay for.
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Originally posted by pollard:
Originally posted by bellenseb:
That was always a huge gyp for the American music fan
uk artists often put extra tracks on their us releases, so it all evens out [/b]
But that is a double con, as if you're in the UK you have to buy the US version of the album, also, to get the extra tracks. If you are in the US, and a fan, you will have bought the album on import already.
Either way a fan ends up with two copies of the album.
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I'm 2/3s over on the spectrum. I love to buy CDs, and still buy a lot. I have, however, started to exchange burned CDs of bands I don't know, want to listen to, etc. Basically, CDs I wouldn't buy otherwise. If I find a band I really like (like Sloan, when a friend gave me One Chord to Another), I buy the rest of the catalog (I bought the other 4 or 5 Sloan CDs within a year). In terms of my purchases, a bit of sharing usually benefits the artist in the end.
I still experiment and buy something because the buzz is good and it's been described as something I'd like, but I'm not going to do that for every band I hear about. Just look at this board; though I have hundreds of CDs, I don't know a lot of the bands that are faves on here...
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
But emusic had to change because it was not viable.
It was good in some ways and terrible in others. Concentrating on the bad.....It was never going to be more than a niche service because it never had "top 50 artists" on it. Plus I have several albums missing tracks that I tried downloading 5 times or more.
this is true but you were trying to download tracks when the system was overloaded with users trying to grab as many albums as possible. i had the same problem, but because i'm still a subscriber i can continue to download, without it counting against my monthly limit, any album/track i've already downloaded. an itunes user can only download a track once. also emusic tells you up front what format their downloads are encoded with (192kbps VBR mp3 encoded w/LAME). I have yet to find in iTunes where it directly says this. There is mention of AAC but little else. Buyer beware I guess, and don't accidently delete a track without backing it up.
so what if it's a niche service, you've beginning to sound like the trolls that frequent the emusic bbs. emusic has a great communitiy of list makers so it was easy to find stuff that one wasn't familiar with. it's got a better selection of the stuff i listen to then itunes, for a lot cheaper.
regardless of whether or not emusic was viable ecomonic model, it will forever define what i view as what an electronic download should cost to me personally.
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Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
an itunes user can only download a track once.
I am not 100% sure, but I don't think this is true.
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i was wrong about the only downloading once
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Are you sure about the one download? If your windows PC crashes mid-download, what happens? I would have thought it would let you download multiple times. It does keep a list for you of what you have downloaded via the store, right?
You can burn as many CDs as you like though, for backups and whatever.
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I checked apple support, if your pc loses power it continues downloading from where it was at the time, there is a whole support document saying you can only download once.
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Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
regardless of whether or not emusic was viable ecomonic model, it will forever define what i view as what an electronic download should cost to me personally.
This is the essentially the same argument people use about napster and Kazzaa. It is a fallacy.
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Originally posted by pollard:
I checked apple support, if your pc loses power it continues downloading from where it was at the time, there is a whole support document saying you can only download once.
I couldnt find it very quickly, thanks.
So that is quite cool to be able to do that.
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Download Restarting
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93015 (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93015)
Downloading Once
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93050 (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93050)
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
regardless of whether or not emusic was viable ecomonic model, it will forever define what i view as what an electronic download should cost to me personally.
This is the essentially the same argument people use about napster and Kazzaa. It is a fallacy. [/b]
i'm currently paying .22 cents a track and therefore think .99 cents a track is a ripoff... no fallacy about it...
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Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
regardless of whether or not emusic was viable ecomonic model, it will forever define what i view as what an electronic download should cost to me personally.
i'm currently paying .22 cents a track and therefore think .99 cents a track is a ripoff... no fallacy about it...
You appear to be saying two different things. In the first I presumed you were talking about the old model. In the second you are clearly talking about the new model.
22cents, but you pay less because you have to subscribe, for one. I bet there are plenty of people who subscribe who do not download their full quota.
For the casual music fan who wants the darkness and hey ya by outkast Emusic would be a lonely place. However cheap the downloads were, it wouldnt make a difference.
I bet there are more albums I want, especially in the top 10 download section, in Emuisc. But then I am probably more than a casual music fan.
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
I am probably more than a casual music fan. [/b]
braggart
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If it was boastful, or empty I would not have said probably in front of it.....
I am probably the smartest person I know.
Oh and my point was, I hate the darkness, if find the whole thing derisible. And outkast has a catchy song, but I can find better fluff somewhere else, probably my navel. But both of those make the itunes top 10
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honestly, i have no idea what it was costing me a track under the old emusic plan... because some months i didn't download anything and some months i would get 10+ albums. i still felt as though i was getting my monies worth. based on that i still feel $10 or higher is still to much to pay for a full album download.
the labels providing music to emusic weren't making boatload loads of money from the service, but at least they were getting paid. matador once quipped that a few cents per track is better than nothing...
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i would suspect that the typical emusic would have no problem downloading their 40 or 90 tracks a month... hell you can still get the entire CCR boxset for less than it costs retail. they are also still adding titles from CD Baby, Koch, Kill Rock Stars, Instinct, as well as live recordings...
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
If it was boastful, or empty I would not have said probably in front of it.....
We all know that "probably" was in fact a feeble attempt at irony... :p
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Vanquished is a bit strong, there Markie.
This isn't much of a surprise to me. But remember, start-ups don't have to make profits in their first years.
iTunes makes no money for Apple, they make money in the Ipods and other hardware. According to Jobs, 77 cents of each song sold on iTunes goes to the RIAA and the other 29 cents can't nearly be enough to cover costs of running iTunes. What Apple gets is brand marketing with the iPod, which is clearly a profit maker for Apple. [SIDENOTE: The Mini iPod, however, will not be a profit maker for Apple. Why would anybody buy that thing for $50 less then what it would cost to buy a device with 4 times the storage?]
Napster has licensed out it's hardware to Samsung, who I'm guessing is not making much money either as I'm the only one I know who owns the Napster/Samsung player.
All I know is my 20GB Napster Player (or any other WMA capable player) plays the entire Napster collection of songs (nearly 1 million) and holds 5,000 of those at a time for a measly $10 a month and for me it's worth it. If I like the album, I go to Ameoba and buy it used after it??s been out for a few months. If I don??t like it, I delete it and replace it with another album Napster offers. So for $10 I have a great ??rental? policy I guess, except my only limitation is hard drive space and availability.
If you want to listen to new music, I don??t see a better solution than the subscription to Napster. Unfortunately, I must not be buying enough songs off of Napster, so that puts me in the middle of this scale we??ve laid out. I download from Napster to listen to new music on my MP3 player, but I rarely purchase music from them. I still prefer the CD. But I love my subscription to Napster!
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Markie posting under someone elses account alert!
Originally posted by vansmack:
Vanquished is a bit strong, there Markie.
This isn't much of a surprise to me.
You were all gung-ho about it a few months ago....
[/QUOTE]
iTunes makes no money for Apple, they make money in the Ipods and other hardware. According to Jobs, 77 cents of each song sold on iTunes goes to the RIAA and the other 29 cents can't nearly be enough to cover costs of running iTunes.
[/QB][/QUOTE]
Math, not add. Does not compute.
RIAA or the record companies, surely the later. 20 something cents isnt so bad when you get millions of them. As long as it pays for marketing, as you say, then its free marketing for the whole apple brand.
[/QB]
The Mini iPod, however, will not be a profit maker for Apple. Why would anybody buy that thing for $50 less then what it would cost to buy a device with 4 times the storage?]
[/QB][/QUOTE]
Bullshit. that is a very blinkered view. Based on ultimate storage capacity being the be-all and end all. Only people who post on internet chatboards really need to carry more than 100 CDs worth around at a time. If I had to get a new player if the old one died tomorrow. I would get the mini. I dont mind just putting 4gb on shuffle. 40gb is more annoying...Oh it goes on sale tomorrow and they have 100,000 pre-orders. So if that is all they sell, well it wont be a failure. Plus It is close to the $200 gift price point.......
[/QB]All I know is my 20GB Napster Player (or any other WMA capable player) plays the entire Napster collection of songs (nearly 1 million) and holds 5,000 of those at a time for a measly $10 a month and for me it's worth it. If I like the album, I go to Ameoba and buy it used after it??s been out for a few months. If I don??t like it, I delete it and replace it with another album Napster offers. So for $10 I have a great ??rental? policy I guess, except my only limitation is hard drive space and availability. [/QB][/QUOTE]
I didnt know you could put the tunes on your portable, without buying. That is super cool. But if I didn't know about it, well napster needs to spend money on marketing.
Markie posting under someone elses account alert!
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Originally posted by poorlulu:
Markie posting under someone elses account alert!
I didnt know you could put the tunes on your portable, without buying. That is super cool. But if I didn't know about it, well napster needs to spend money on marketing.
Markie posting under someone elses account alert!
i was just about ask the same question before i was called to haul the trash to the curb...
so napster is a bit like the library concept i keep yapping on about... for $10 i can listen to tracks from the napster library as long as there are tethered to either my pc or one of those mp3 players? i got the impression you only had streaming access. are the tracks actually transferred to the pc? what bitrate are the files encoded at.
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also any word on if they'll support os x in the future? unfortunately my windoze boxes would roll and die at this point if i tried to load xp on them...
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just buy the cd. damn you people are cheap. or just do it the illegal yet worry free way of copying someone elses cd. but id say around 13 bucks isnt too much to get the actualy cd. there are at least 3 plus sides to it...
1)you dont gotta wait
2)better quality
3)you get the bonus stuff included on basically every cd these days
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Originally posted by poorlulu, err Markie:
Math, not add. Does not compute.
RIAA or the record companies, surely the later. 20 something cents isnt so bad when you get millions of them. As long as it pays for marketing, as you say, then its free marketing for the whole apple brand.
[/b]
Don't take my word for it, ask your friend Jobs (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33850.html).
Originally posted by poorlulu, err Markie:
Bullshit. that is a very blinkered view. Based on ultimate storage capacity being the be-all and end all. Only people who post on internet chatboards really need to carry more than 100 CDs worth around at a time. If I had to get a new player if the old one died tomorrow. I would get the mini. I dont mind just putting 4gb on shuffle. 40gb is more annoying...Oh it goes on sale tomorrow and they have 100,000 pre-orders. So if that is all they sell, well it wont be a failure. Plus It is close to the $200 gift price point.......
You'd be a fool to buy it at that price, but then again, I always thought you weren't the smartest Brit I've ever met. Is the spared quater of an inch-squared really all that important to you? Maybe it's the pretty colors you like....oooohhh pretty colors....ooooohhhhhh.
Oh and news flash, just because you have 40 GB doesn't mean that you have to use all 40 GB. Of course if you access to the entire library of iTunes, maybe you'd want 40 GBs, which brings me to.....
Originally posted by poorlulu, err Markie:
I didnt know you could put the tunes on your portable, without buying. That is super cool. But if I didn't know about it, well napster needs to spend money on marketing.
No argument from me on the marketing of the subscription plan. You're not the first person I've told that to that said "Wow, why don't they market that better" The truth is, I don't know. But I have reaffirmed the fact that you don't read much of what I write because I have said this about Napster at least 3 times in previous posts.
And to answer Kosmo's questions:
With Napster I can Stream, Download and listen to the entire Napster collection on up to four devices that support WMA-9 for $10 a month. The only limitation is burning - no burning allowed. As soon as I stop paying, the license to listen is revoked. I must listen to 3 dozen new albums a month and buy about a dozen of them on CD afterwards.
And it's not Napster that is the problem for the Mac OS. The question is when is the Mac OS going to support WMA, or even more importantly, when is the iPod going to support WMA? And the answer is...again, I don't know.
If Markie's right, that iTunes is just a marketing ploy for the iPod, then why not support both WMA and AAC and have the best, most versatile portable Media player on the planet? How long do you think it will take for other MP3 players to support the Open Source AAC? Even Fred Anderson, Apple's Chief Financial Officer, feels the same way: The iTunes Music Store for Windows is thought to convince people to purchase iPods and -- over time -- Macintoshes. Source for GGW (http://www.veracast.com/ssb/2003/tech/92210683.cfm) Oh I see, iTunes makes people buy iPods, which makes people buy Macs and it's all based on an Open Source. When will they learn?
This "us against them mentality" with AAC is exactly why the Mac is regarded as a superior machine to the MS based models and has less than 10% market share. The Ipod is on its way. And believe me, if HP changes it's mind and supports AAC and WMA (as expected), it will surpass the iPod.
However, if they want to have the best music store, then keep the iPod as is and burn in effigy as the rest of the competiition supports a different format that plays on about 200 different and competitvely priced MP3 players. And nobody thinks this is the case. Apple wants to sell computers, pure and simple.
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Originally posted by stdrocks44:
just buy the cd. damn you people are cheap. or just do it the illegal yet worry free way of copying someone elses cd. but id say around 13 bucks isnt too much to get the actualy cd. there are at least 3 plus sides to it...
1)you dont gotta wait
2)better quality
3)you get the bonus stuff included on basically every cd these days
i'm not being cheap i just want to stretch my money farther... being able to hear cds from the ease of my computer is something that strongly appeals to me. the less i have to actaully interact with people the better, especially the nut jobs here :D
and damm microsloth and their pervasive technology and apple for thier me first attitude...
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Originally posted by vansmack:
[QB] ]No argument from me on the marketing of the subscription plan. You're not the first person I've told that to that said "Wow, why don't they market that better" The truth is, I don't know. But I have reaffirmed the fact that you don't read much of what I write because I have said this about Napster at least 3 times in previous posts.
No, as I understood it. You had access to the whole napster collection..... fine, good for you. What you had not made clear, at least to me, was you could put anything from the collection on to your portable device. Now that is super fucking cool.
I am not sure where apple is going with itunes. I didnt think the original ipod was a good idea. I thought it was too expensive. But I was wrong. I think that makes me a poor judge of where they should go in the future.
I would say that things are going well for them right now. Using itunes to strengthen brand identity is fine. Making little money from the store is a great idea, also. As it keeps starving artists off of Apples back. (But you did say 77 and 29 cents. That does not add up to 99cents. Where did you get those figures not in the article you linked)
I think the mini is a great product. Its smaller so fits easier into a pocket, great for going running or to the gym...If I dont want to use the full 40gb, why waste money on the full 40GB. You are odd.
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40gb is great not because you'll listen to that many songs very often, but on shuffle play the machine has such a great variety of songs to choose from, always surprising you.
Also, it's great to have all (or most, in some cases) of your collection with you for all those times you suddenly really want to listen to one particular song or album.
Arguments like "you'll never listen to 40gb anyway!" make me bristle.
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Everyone has their own way. I have a 5gb ipod and I have about 10 must have albums on there. The rest is mostly new stuff or old stuff I never listened to when I bought it. That way it forces me to listen to my new records.
But I only have a 40gb hard drive solely for music, it is full. I have been listening to that on shuffle the last couple of days and it has been quite good fun.
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True that. For some people a few GB is probably plenty. You can cherry-pick your favorite songs from your collection and have a fun mix.
But, a 40gb player that fits most of my collection lets me really appreciate all the things I've ignored in the past. On lots of albums I own I like a few songs but haven't gotten into the whole thing for whatever reason. In some cases of course I just don't like the rest, but in most cases I've found that hearing them in a new juxtaposition or in a new environment at a particular time has really opened my eyes to them. And I probably wouldn't have bothered pulling the individual albums off the shelf and listening to these songs I now love.
And the "impulse ability" of having everything with you is great because of the way that things in everyday life trigger memories and associated songs. You never know when you'll suddenly really want to hear that old b-side you wouldn't have ever crammed on a small machine.
Not that a small machine isn't perfect for some people, I just find the "no one needs that much room" argument not true.
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On the train back from NYC a couple weeks back, I suddenly HAD to listen to Freedy Johnston. Three albums worth. What bliss that I had it with me. I've got a 20 GB, and it's not enough.
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Originally posted by bellenseb:
Not that a small machine isn't perfect for some people, I just find the "no one needs that much room" argument not true.
Actually I know plenty of people who have less than 100 CDs......
The rest of your post, I agree with.
Oh Bags......
Freedy Johnson, what were you thinking?
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Mark,
Yeah, totally, small machines are perfect for small collections too. I was just saying you often hear people say "NO one would need that much room", and how that wasn't true, even if you don't necessarily listen to every song on it very often.
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
Originally posted by bellenseb:
Not that a small machine isn't perfect for some people, I just find the "no one needs that much room" argument not true.
Actually I
Oh Bags......
Freedy Johnson, what were you thinking? [/b]
Don't you denigrate. We all have our singer/songwriter gulity pleasures. I'll bet EVEN you.
I love Duncan Sheik's first album too. How 'bout that!?
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
No, as I understood it. You had access to the whole napster collection..... fine, good for you. What you had not made clear, at least to me, was you could put anything from the collection on to your portable device. Now that is super fucking cool.
I am not sure where apple is going with itunes. I didnt think the original ipod was a good idea. I thought it was too expensive. But I was wrong. I think that makes me a poor judge of where they should go in the future.
I would say that things are going well for them right now. Using itunes to strengthen brand identity is fine. Making little money from the store is a great idea, also. As it keeps starving artists off of Apples back. (But you did say 77 and 29 cents. That does not add up to 99cents. Where did you get those figures not in the article you linked)
I think the mini is a great product. Its smaller so fits easier into a pocket, great for going running or to the gym...If I dont want to use the full 40gb, why waste money on the full 40GB. You are odd. [/b]
Sorry, I didn't realize I typed 77 cents. The RIAA won a case back in the end of 2002 that awarded them 70 cents per song.
http://www.thestranger.com/2002-11-28/city4.html (http://www.thestranger.com/2002-11-28/city4.html)
Yes, that's 70% of the money spent on a song goes to the RIAA. Now, is it the same for an album? I hope not, but I'm not sure because $9.95 an album for a 14 track album means 15 cents in revenue for iTunes/Napster, etc. That's clearly a loss.
As for the download part, see my third and sixth entry in this original Napster post:
http://www.930.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=005092 (http://www.930.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=005092)
You get up to four devices (though I haven't tested this yet). Thus far, for $10 a month, my downloaded Napster files (up to at least 500,000 to choose from) work on my computer, Smackette's handheld via a SD Card, and my Napster player, but they play on any Windows Media Player 9 device, up to 4, as I'm told. I've only tried 3 devices, so it works up to three.
And I'm through talking about the Mini iPod. If you like them great and good luck. Since I no longer live in DC, I can't be the first one to say I told you so when you run out of room, but believe me, in the back of my head I'm just happy knowing that I told you so before you even bought the damn thing. Make sure you get a pretty color though:
<img src="http://a772.g.akamai.net/7/772/51/4631d2325b822b/www.apple.com/ipodmini/gallery/images/ipodminifamilythumb01062004.jpg" alt=" - " />
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Originally posted by vansmack:
Yes, that's 70% of the money spent on a song goes to the RIAA. Now, is it the same for an album? I hope not, but I'm not sure because $9.95 an album for a 14 track album means 15 cents in revenue for iTunes/Napster, etc. That's clearly a loss.[/IMG]
I presume its 70%, but to the RIAA, and they divy it out to the record companies? that does not make sense. Surely its 70% to the record company? That is fine. That with me record companies get $7 an album. Not far off what they get for a regular CD I imagine. The status quo isnt disrupted too far.
I have a 5gb ipod, (Pollards original player) it serves me fine. It is getting a bit crazy though. It doesnt like shuffle. It played 3 Franz Ferdinand songs in a row on shuffle then two national songs....
We saw Freedy Johnston live. He was Ok, but it was a drunk crowd and he was having problems keeping peoples attention.
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Originally posted by mark e smith:
We saw Freedy Johnston live. He was Ok, but it was a drunk crowd and he was having problems keeping peoples attention.
I saw Freedy Johnston at the Palace in Hollywood back in the mid-to-early ninties. He opened for the Cowboy Junkies and had this hot brunette sitting back stage watching him. She came out and sang a song with him. Turns out it was Suzanna Hoffs. Smoking hot! That is all I remember about Freedy Johnston.
The CJ were good though. It was the first time I heard the up-tempo live version of Sweet Jane in stead of the melancholoy but brilliant album version. I really dug it.