Re: (TV) OT:Apple unveils service to sell 200,000 digital music titles onl ine

[Maurice Rickard <maurice@mac.com>]

At 10:51 AM -0400 4/29/03, Casey, Leo J wrote:
> Anyone care to speculate what impact this may have on 
> music/recording biz?  Is it irrelevant to 'average' music consumer? 
> (I realize probably irrelevant to 99% of people on MMM List)

Too early to tell, of course.  No TV in the store, but _White Light, 
White Heat_ is listed as a "Staff Favorite."  Thing is, ACC is a 
format with digital rights management built-in, set to allow limited 
copying among one's own machines.  And there are comments on various 
Apple message boards claiming that a song encoded as a 192 kbps mp3 
sounds significantly better than the same song encoded as an ACC 
(admittedly, they tested this with "Hotel California," which of 
course sounds crappy under any conditions).   If ACC's even worse 
than mp3, I'd say this would go nowhere, but then the record-buying 
(or, er, downloading) public has proven that they don't much care 
about quality.

I've also seen someone complain about the service not having any 
Madonna, Foo Fighters, or Britney Spears.  To me that's a selling 
point, but a cursory glance at the selection doesn't show enough 
obscure stuff to catch my interest, so it seems possible that the 
service might not know what kind of store to be--a "we have what 
everyone else is buying" store only, or a "we even have stuff that's 
hard to find in the physical world" store.  With no need for physical 
inventory, I think they'd have an opportunity to do the latter well. 
But if the sound of the file format sucks even worse than .mp3, then 
it'd be useless to me.  (I would've liked to see .ogg support in 
iTunes 4, but apparently such is not to be.)
--
Maurice Rickard
http://mauricerickard.com/
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