April 29, 2003
Apple and Other News
1. The Supreme Court decided not to take up this important Internet jurisdiction case. Interesting.
2. So, let’s dig into the Apple iTunes extravanganza. Like I said yesterday, I always find people like Steve Jobs pretty amusing in these situations. Everything is a revolution. All of a sudden, I should be thankful that they’re offering me these rights which I’ve really had all along. Though I know what he means in plain English, he’s speaking in Marketer-ese.
I still think the DRM isn’t perfect. I won’t be able to use my current MP3 player without burning an audio CD and then re-encoding it, degrading the sound in the process. The “mix” in “rip, mix, and burn” has become “manage” – which (to me) means you can move your songs around but you can’t fiddle with the file’s actual contents itself (perhaps to edit or sample a song).
That said, this DRM is still far better then what the music labels have been offering. It comes much closer to meeting my general expectations for using music. And, getting rid of the subscription fee is huge. This really is a gigantic price drop compared to the other services.
Does this mean that iTunes will launch a boom in legitimate music services? Will people actually shift away from KaZaA (if that is even possible)?
For this shift to occur, I think iTunes will have to be so successful initially that the online music services seriously begin to compete with each other. Particularly, we need to see competition over prices. Once prices hit a bottom, we could still see competition involving other offerings. For instance, I can imagine a time when Apple gives away (or heavily discounts) an iPod with every purchase of 20 songs. Could we possibly see the day when a music service offers a CD-burner for free? Maybe. In any case, the key is competition so that legitimate music services become as attractive as possible.
iTunes’ success is contingent on growing their music selection quickly. People are probably only going to want to use one app to do all their downloading. If they can’t find a significant number of songs from iTunes, they won’t even bother buying what iTunes does offer.
3. This Washington Post article had some pretty interesting bits. Regarding Supernodes, I don’t think they have it right. The Verizon decision does not really affect Supernodes. They are not actually swapping files. You could go after Supernodes for indexing (a la Napster), but, as I said yesterday, I’m not sure that that any individual Supernode makes a significant enough contribution to be liable.
Filed by Derek Slater at 11:03 am under General news
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