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-Keith Pelczarski
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Rock and roll
Apple dragged the music industry another step toward the future today, announcing the new iTunes Music Store and a new slimmer, swankier line of iPod portable music players.
The new iTunes Music Store offers downloads for 99 cents a track, or $9.99 for full albums. Definitely attractive price points for me, especially considering that I spend the most time listening to music on my powerbook. The savings might be enough to make me forego the liner notes and such. The selection of songs isn't bad, though there are clearly a lot of bands that aren't represented. This manifests itself on both ends of the spectrum, with no tracks from big acts like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull as well as no tracks from smaller label acts like Flogging Molly and NOFX -- not that NOFX is a new band or anything. (I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bran Van 3000 had one track listed, though.)
The iTunes site stores your credit card information, so ordering is devilishly easy... when you click "buy it" the music quickly downloads right into the iTunes player. Unfortunately for most folks (Apple included), the service is mac-only at this point. Another bummer is that the files sold are AAC, which is basically MP4. This isn't a bad thing if you play all your music on your mac or iPod, or even if you burn CDs for listening on other devices. It does make it somewhat difficult to use some older portable MP3 players, though. All this might get more people to buy macs and iPods, but probably just means a smaller audience for Apple. In the end, they'll do what they've always done -- blaze the trail so others can get fat off the new territory.
Even with some shortcomings, I'm sure that I'll be purchasing more music from the iTunes store in the future. That's right, I said "more." Tonight I picked up some Eminem for me and some Tori Amos for the missus. (And I wonder why our TiVo is confused.)
ROCK!
:: Keith 23:01 [link] :: ::