I recently replaced my iPod Mini with a new iPod Nano. I like the updates to the user interface. I think it is good enough to be worth me upgraded. I really like the display.
This is finally a reason for me to try to get cover art for all my MP3s. The interface with the cover art is much better than the generic music note that you get without artwork.
The problem is I have a lot of songs that do not have any artwork. iTunes will get the artwork if the album is available via iTunes. Being a big e-music fan I have a lot of albums from there that are not on iTunes. It is a good deal of work to join up those albums and that artwork. I also have a good number of songs that have no artwork at all. The songs are from all sorts of places. Does anyone know a good place to get MP3 artwork? What do you do when it is a song without an album?
I was reading this story of how states want to charge sales tax for digital products. I think it is the wrong way to act to just extend old tax standards to cover this situation. I live in San Jose, I am using my computer in Santa Clara right now, and Apple is in Cupertino. If I bought a song right now, whose sales tax would be charged. Is it different if I was using my computer in Pennsylvania at my parent's house?
I understand that states and local government need sales taxes. I understand that revenue is needed. Personally I want another five years of hands off the internet. Lets see which business models are really going to work. What are we going to do for Smart Phone Apps? How about services that need subscriptions? I think that need tax structures are needed for this to work well. I do not want to look at this tax in five years and see that we did it all wrong.
Above is why I never bought music from Microsoft. Something in the back of my head knew this was coming some day. If Microsoft did not rule the market they were going to leave the market. Microsoft is not really leaving the market, they just shifted to the Zune marketplace. All the MP3s in the Zune Marketplace are DRM free. Microsoft is not doing that bad of a thing here.
I know the people in the music industry do not see this as a problem. To them it is no different than switching from cassette to CD. The difference in the eyes of the customer was that upgrading to CD was getting value with that upgrade. Here the customer is not getting any additional value.
I think this is a good example of the music industry alienating it's customers. It is that alienation that keeps people from paying for your product. The story above is why I currently will not buy any music with DRM. It is all MP3s for me now.
George Kliavkoff, chief digital officer at NBC Universal had a great quote about pirated content and portable media:
If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures," Kliavkoff said in an onstage interview at the Ad:Tech conference. "One of the big issues for NBC is piracy. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products."
Wow, this one is a little disturbing to me. This guy needs to know a little about technology. I cannot find his education listed on the web. Maybe he a lawyer and not an engineer. From this comment you can tell he has no idea what made the Apple iPod successful. It is successful because it is an open platform. I can put my content on it without having to have that content blessed by Apple. If I needed my content blessed by Apple, I would buy a different device.
I would be afraid of any antipiracy software on my portable media player. How is that player going to tell if the content it pirated? Will I be able to put my own content on my player? If I make the content will I have to have it blessed by someone? Will I not be allowed to put content from third parties on my media player?
Right now I have more than one way to get a TV show to my iPod. Being a TiVo User I can use TiVo Desktop Plus to transfer a show to my computer and from there to my iPod. Is that piracy? I am paying for the program, it has all the adds, NBC has not stopped TiVo for TiVoToGo yet.
I know this comment is not really about this generation of Portable media players. It is about the Media players like the iPod Phone and the iPod Touch. Players that are connected to the web. I know he wants to make sure those players have his approval. I know that he wants media players to be closed systems. Cell Phone companies are making people thing this is possible. I think it is a bad idea for everyone including content company. As you close off avenues to content getting to boxes, you like the reasons for people to buy your content.
A few days ago I saw something on Buzz Anderson's twitter stream about playlists. He was quoting someone and I think the quote was "Most people still see playlists as functional objects and not expressive objects." I have been thinking about this quote.
I looked at my iTunes collection. I have a huge music library. It is better that 200 GB and 40,000 songs. i listen to a lot of music, but not enough to even make a dent in my collection. On top of that I am adding more all the time.
I am one of those people that use playlist as a functional device and not an expressive one. I think that 9 out of 10 of my playlists are use to organize my music or to manage my music on my iPod. I am not trying to create the perfect mix. I am not trying to express myself to anyone else.
To be honest, I still like to listen to albums. As often as people say that the album is dead, I have not seen anything replace it yet. I do not know a serious artist who has gone back to singles. There are lots of artists I like that are putting out good albums.
The other reason that my playlists are not expressive is that I am not sharing them with anyone. There are lots of problems with sharing playlists. I know that most of these Buzz has made a new software program to help people share playlists, C86. The only problem here is that the program is Mac only. That cuts out most of the people I want to share playlists with.
Playlists will keep being functional as long as people cannot share them easily.
A few years ago, when web 2.0 was a new term and not beaten into the ground, an Apple Engineer told me that Apple does not understand the web. His example to me was iTunes. At the time he told me that he wanted iTunes to be more like Flickr and less like a retail store.
At the time I remember him being right. As time has gone on, he has become more and more right. I feel that iTunes is a good program, but it is missing the chance to be a great program. It is missing the chance to be a true music portal. It is missing the chance to be a true media portal.
Over the past couple of months I have really be into podcasts. The problem is that I use three different computers, My laptop, my desktop, and my work computer. WIth iTunes now I have three different lists of pod cases. A different lists on each computer. iTunes is an internet system. I should be able to have a single podcast list no matter what computer I am on. Even if I do not have all the podcasts set to download on each computer.
I have an account on iTunes, but there is very little I can do with that account. Instead of creating a killer web app, Apple has create a store front. Many people might say that is all they need to created. If Apple created a killer web app they would have a way to increase their sales. It would be easy to see the benefit of sharing my iTunes collection with my friends. Being able to share information with myself would be a great tool. Now I have the same podcast on one than one machine.
I really think the web is the future. Software is going to be replace replaced by services. Hardware needs to take advantage of those services. Apple is both a hardware and a software company. They have made an incredible comeback over the last couple of year. I think they are leaving a lot on the table by not understanding the web.
This is really a game of chicken. Both Sides think the other side needs them more. Both sides think if they do not need to give in. Both of them think they are better off in control.
They are both wrong is the problem. NBC thinks it can make more money with other online providers. They want to make different bundles because they think it will bring more revenue. What NBC is missing what customers love about iTunes. not needing to buy albums, just cherry picking ones they want. If NBC wants to force customers to buy content they don't want to get what they want, they are making a mistake. They run the risk losing customers to other content.
The mistake that iTunes is making is that they are opening the door to other download providers. NBC, Sci-fi, and USA networks have been the cornerstones of the iTunes Video store. If content is king, other providers will play ball with NBC to get this content. Those providers what a chunk of what iTunes has.
The interesting thing about NBC's decision for me is how a year ago it was a big story how iTunes saved the Office. After being saved by iTunes the Office has become a hit. One of the anchors of NBC's Line up. It is funny to me how this would not be important to NBC.
My guess is that NBC has no way to figure out how many people who viewed the Office on iTunes. They think they could get that many people on their own site when they launch it. The problem is that NBC is trying to be in more control when they do not understand the world they are operating. This is a major problem.
One interesting bit was this.
In addition to the pricing issue, NBC Universal wants iTunes to stiffen anti-piracy provisions so computer users would not have easy access to illegal downloads.
What are they talking about. Do they want Apple computers not to work with bittorrent? Do they want iTunes files harder to crack? Do they want more control over the Mac platform. All three of these are bad ideas. I want to know what they want.
I am not saying that is a good thing. I have read before that the labels want more pricing control when it comes to music sold on the iTunes music store. The labels want to be able to charge more for the latest albums and Apple has said no (sorry I do not have a footnote for this)
This is a strange game for Universal Music to play. Apple iTunes is the top electronic music store, but it has not taken over the music world yet. Electronic sales has not grown at the rate it was expected to grow. Getting rid of 15% of sales is a big thing, but if you think you can back another player in the electronic sales space it is worth the risk.
The problem with going against apple is DRM. The iPod has something like 72% market share for digital music players. It is larger if you look at the installed base. If you want to sell electronic music to most of your customers, you have to see it in MP3 format. Your customers with iPods will not be able to play it in a non-Fair Play DRM system. I do not see Universal selling non-DRM music.
What I don't know is how the average music fan makes buying decisions. Let's say that Fall Out Boy is putting out a new album. How many sales will they lose if they are not on iTunes? Some percentage of users will choose a different album on iTunes, but how many? Is it different for different artist? Is the risk of not signing the contract with iTunes worth it?
I want to know what Universal music's plan is. I do not think at will marketing to iTunes is a good plan on its own. I think there needs to be some other plan along with it. I wonder if Universal also sees it this way. I wonder if this is a sign of weakness for iTunes?
People are taking about the data embedded in the new DRMless iTunes. People do not have to worry about DRM, but they do have to worry about their e-mail address going with the file. That means if you give your DRM free file to anyone, you have to trust that they will not share it with the world.
This will be interesting to see what happens. I wonder how well people have to protect their files. If I leave my network unprotected and my files get shared every where, will I be responsible? Lets say my computer gets stolen, can I get sued if those files end up on the net? What if someone is being vindictive and shares my files without me knowing? In none of these cases did I share the file. I did not take action with malice of forethought. What would the copyright cops do to me in those situations?
I know that including the email address along with the file is a good idea. I know that this is a reasonable thing for copyright holders to ask for. I just want to make sure that a signal song from one person is going to get out into the open. It is just going to happen. The people who own the copyrights should only go after people who do this all the time.
The Big Gap is the place between early adapters and average consumers. The Big Gap is the difference between a single company being able to carve out a business and a whole industry being able to thrive. The Big Gap is often the difference between what people are saying and what they are doing. Right now that big gap is between Apple being able to sell TV shows on iTunes and the average customer wanting to pay for TV show downloads.
A new report from Forrester Research says people are not willing to pay for TV show downloads. This does not surprise me at all. People feel that they are already paying enough for TV. People pay a lot of money for cable, they do not want to pay more for other TV.
Only a sliver of the video-viewing masses -- about 9 percent -- have the know-how, time, money and patience to surf the Internet for programming, according to the Forrester report.
I am in that 9 percent, but I am still not willing to do it. I missed a couple of important episodes of Heroes, but I am not willing to pay $2 an episode to catch the ones I missed. I will just watch something else instead.
I know that television producers have made a lot of money with TV shows on DVD. TV shows DVDs have been big sellers. I think that people see downloads as different than DVDs. I think the downloads are not as friendly or collectible as the DVDs. Until people can burn downloads onto DVD I think this problem will continue.
Television producers face a real problem. They will have a problem passing along any more cost along to the consumer. Consumers are going to spend their money else where. The 30 second ad is coming to an end. Television producers and networks have to find a new way to get advertisers messages across. That might mean less revenue for them. That will turn the world of television up side down.
Lets see if the Apple TV has any power to change this. I do not think it will.
It is finally happened. It looks like one of the major record labels if finally breaking ranks. It appears that EMI will allow their music to be sold on iTunes without DRM. This is not really a surprise. People have been talking about this for months now. People have thought EMI would be the first company to break rank. They are the weakest of the major labels. People have thought that they would be the most likely to take the risk.
Will this be a typing point? This is hard to say. How to listeners, fans, and customers decide what music to buy. It has little to do with where they can buy it or what label the band it on. The number one people buy music is because they like it. If EMI does not release music that people like this will not help them. What it might help is with getting more people to pay for music they might get some other way.
This is a good start. I do not think that we are close to other companies joining EMI. I think that companies are going to resist a lot before they agree to also go without DRM. The number one thing customers can do is vote with our wallets. Lets all go and download songs from EMI when the DRM goes away.
I am on vacation this week, but I am not going anywhere. I am just going to stay home in San Jose. Staying home for a week means that I will be listening to a lot of music. I will either be sitting at my computer with iTunes going or I will be out somewhere with my iPod.
In the last couple of weeks I have bought the new Apples in Stereo and new Modest Mouse albums. This will be a good time to get to know those albums better. I have been buying music at a pretty good clip this year. I need to take some time to listen to it. Since my time is mine over the next week, listening to music sounds like a good way to spend that time.
Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
One of the first big problems here is that the CD has yet to die. When the iTunes Music store launched in 2004 I did not expect to be buying non protected CDs in 2007. Part of that is that all the CD protection schemes have sucked. The worst of all was the Sony BMG XCP. That was so bad that companies might have scurried away from DRM CDs in fear forever.
I think iPods have become so big that most the people I know will not buy CDs that they cannot rip to iTunes. Everyone wants MP3 so they can take their music with them. I would return any CD I could not Rip.
For my friends who do not use iTunes, they usually give me three reasons. DRM is the first reason. Everyone knows that iTunes DRM is easy to beat. All you need to do is burn it to a CD and Rip it again. This is still too much of a hassle. We want it without any DRM. They would also like it better if it was MP3
The second reason is because of the Backup policy. If you buy a song from iTunes and lose it, you have to buy it again. That really sucks. This is an electronic world. If I am really buying the music license I should be able to re-download the song.
The third and maybe more important is the quality of the music. AAC, the iTunes music format, is not a lossless format. For me the discount is not deep enough for me to buy the music in a lossy format. If it is an album I am excited about I will buy the CD. If it is something I just want to try, I will buy it from eMusic. I only buy music from iTunes when I have a gift card.
To be honest I think it is too early to call download music service failures. If they are still in business they are not a failure yet. I know that everyone wants everything to move in internet time, but I think this is a sign that real world time still counts for something. We are still in the first generation of these services. I think that they 2.0 versions might surprise us.
I read some blogs and blog columnist say they were disappointed at Apple that iTunes 7 does not have HD support. They want shows and movies in at least 1080i resolution. Whenever asked about download bandwidth and time constraints, they say that Apple should use BitTorrent or a system like it. I hear people all the time talk about BitTorrent like it is free bandwidth.
Could a commercial service like Apple's iTunes Music Story use a shared distribution system successfully? I am not sure what the technical barriers to this would be. My guess is that it would not be as easy as it seems. Even if it was really easy, I am not sure what kind of customer experence it would be. I am not sure a technology like BitTorrent would support the kind of business Apple or Amazon wants to build.
But I also inserted the DVD versions of the two movies in my laptop, and the difference was stark. The DVD versions, in both cases, were noticeably sharper. The lower video quality of the downloaded movies would have been especially obvious if I'd connected my computer to a big-screen TV -- a move Apple and many others see as the next step for online video.
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The few dollars I'd save with Unbox or iTunes movie downloads aren't enough to compensate for all these shortcomings. With DVDs, I can easily move from players attached to my home TV sets to the DVD-ROM drives on my computers to the $89 portable player I bought to keep my 6-year-old daughter Sara amused on long car trips
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The transition to digital downloads won't ``happen overnight,'' Jobs told the Wall Street Journal. ``It takes years of investment,'' he said.
I'm happy to let Apple, Amazon and others make that investment, as long as they don't expect me to help that investment pay off until downloads are faster, video quality is better and prices are lower.
I am not sure how much control the download services will have on speed or price. If the price is too low the movie companies will say no. Speed is all about your internet collection. I wonder how much Apple and Amazon will be able to effect these things.
Replacing CDs with iTunes was a no brainer. The iPod and iTunes made listening to music easier for most people. It looks like the movie services make it harder than a DVD to watch movies. I think this is going to be the hard thing to overcome.
I also think that Apple and Amazon need to get companies to allow movies to be ripped into people's collections. Right now this is a major problem. Maybe they should work with rental companies to make discs that cannot be ripped and the ones I buy from the store can. I think that will be a barrier for these services to take off.
iTV - I Could swear Someone Else Owns that trademark
I looked at Apples Announcements today about the new iPods and new iTunes Movie Store. I think that Apple has done a lot get into a place where they can download video to people. I think they answered a lot of the questions I had last week.
I am happy to see that the movies and TV shows will be downloaded at 640x480 now. I think this is important. This makes it much more watchable on a larger screen. It will still look kind of crappy on a big TV. I wonder if they are working their way up to HD signals. That would take a lot more bandwidth.
I am not sure about the selection of movies. They are launching with 75 movies. That is a lot less than Amazon has right now with Unbox. Apple is only launching with movies from Disney. I wonder how long it will take Steve to get other studios on board.
I am interested in seeing the iTV hardward. I could swear that someone owns that trademark already. Maybe Apple bought it too. It has HD outputs, I wonder if HD content is coming. I wonder if that hardware will have a hard drive or not. If there is HD content without a hard drive, that will be rough on home networks. The iTV is an answer that Amazon Unbox does not currently have.
I think the iTV as shown implies that Steve Jobs has no interest in broadcast. He has said before that he was not interested in making a DVR. The iTV would lead me to believe this is true. There are no video inputs just video outputs. I wonder if it will be able to stream DVDs also.
I think the new iPod Nano without video is a good move. The Nano is already the most popular iPod ever. I see no need to ad video pay back to that product. I think it helps them create a value proposition for the regular iPods. I think they are really creating a family of products not just putting the same functions on every product.
I have been reading how everyone is guessing Steve Job's annoncement next week will be about an Apple Movie Service. For a couple years not people have been touting a download movie service as a killer app. All the time I hear how Netflix without the DVD would change the world. There is a geek elite out there that really want this.
I am not sure what will be announced, but I have a hard time seeing an Apple movie download service changing the way people watch movies. Lets say that apple starts this service on Apple only platforms. That means I would have to spend at least $600 to get a MacMini. For $600 I could get a DVD player and a few years worth of Netflix.
Second, I am not sure people are hooking computers up to their TVs. Yeah a 21 inch monitor is a big as my family's TV when I was growing up, but I am not sure people can make an iMac useful for both watch movies and using as a computer. I think the home media computer is still a rare thing. It would take a few years before something like this would really catch on.
Third, I am not sure a pricing structure could compete with renting/buying DVDs. It takes a log of bandwidth to download a movie at DVD quality. I am not sure that people will be willing to watch movies in the current 320x240 iTunes TV show resolution.
Forth, I am not sure enough people really want a movie download service. Right now Video On Demand systems are not as well used as cable companies expected. All of these systems let people play and pause the movies. Why would a movie download system have a bigger impact that Video On Demand which is already hooked up to customers TV sets.
I am not sure what Apple will announce. If they do announce a video download system people will be falling all over themselves to say this is the end of home movies as we have known it. I am just not sure Apple can be the company that can make that change.
Elkit gave me a birthday gift certificate to the iTunes Music Store. Now I need to figure out that to get with it. Tell me if you have any suggestions. I have not idea what to get.
I know I am a real computer music geek. I know that must people would not care about this at all. I am so happy with the 5.0 iTunes update. They have finally added a folders system to iTunes. This means I can organize my play lists.
I must have 60 playlists on iTunes now. With smart play list you can do lots of interesting things. I organize the same music over and over again on different themes. Now I can take the play list that I do not use very often and move them off to the side. I think this is a great add to iTunes.
I have to crack this one again. They album came about because of a technological change. It is going away because of a technological change. If you want to make a concept album, make it all one track. That way you do not have to worry about people pulling it apart.
If you are so worried about the album as an art form, why do you let radio stations play single songs?
