iTunes Gets Better

How do you celebrate one year of product dominance? With a healthy dose of change, happy talk about the future, and a note of reality.

Apple's Music Store is one year old and it has proven to be the first online music store success. It still has a hefty lead in market share, despite healthy competition and, in some ways, a very limiting license for the music purchased. The iPod and the iPod Mini have been huge sales successes from some mystical combination of excellent interface design, a sense of fashion, and the easy integration with both iTunes and the Music Store. And, somewhere along the way, the Music Store has managed to sell 70 million songs.

That's pretty good news if you happen to be Apple.

To celebrate, Apple put out a new version of iTunes for both Windows and Mac users. The new version has nifty new features that address some of users requests (although in a decidedly mixed manner).

1. One big complaint was the inability of iTunes to play WMA files, a popular format with Windows users. iTunes still won't play those files, but does include the capability of importing and encoding those files in Apple's AAC format. It would have been better if iTunes would simply play the WMA files, of course.
   
2. New CD art and jewel case abilities. Frankly, this has been a sticking point for me from the beginning--iTunes should have had the capacity to do this from launch. Better late than never, but there's not much to applaud about when you're this late to the game.
   
3. The store now has a feature called iMix in which users can share their playlists with other store users. It's a community building sales tool somewhat like Amazon's Listmania feature. Nice, but nothing special.
   
4. The Music Store library has grown to over 700,000 songs. That is good news, but it is amazing how little that seems to be when you're looking for an artist that never hit the top 10 charts. The idea, though, is that the service and offerings will continue to grow over time to the point that it is much more wide in scope.
   
5. Originally only three computers could be authorized to play purchased songs. That number has now grown to five. That's a nice bump.
   
6. Originally, a playlist that included purchased music could be burned up to 10 times to CD. You can now only burn 7 copies of the same playlist. Purchased music can be burned as many times as you'd like, but the playlist has to change regularly.
   
7. The big news is the push to put out of print work into the Music Store. While ownership and royalty issues might make it difficult, one of my dreams is to see a service that offers an extremely wide-ranging out of print catalog of music. When I want to hear a song from an artist that was popular when I was young, it would be nice to have one place to go where even those out of print songs will be easy to find. That seems to be one of Jobs' dreams, too. Good for him and good for me, too.
   

There are other changes, too, but most of them are barely worth commenting on. Incremental changes, then, not revolutions in the way iTunes and the Music Store work.

The down side is that Apple had hoped to sell 100 million songs--and, although they are on target to hit a much better number next year, they did fall about 30% short of their goal this year. The Pepsi promo was disappointing with only some 5 million of the potential 100 million songs being claimed.

All in all, the Music Store is a success for Apple, but probably more of a qualified success than we'll ever know. Apple likely makes, after its real costs, nothing but pennies for every song sold. Most of the money goes to the label with just a little going for all the technical realities of hosting a store using proprietary systems and the actual digitizing of the music.

As a model, it's a decent one. There is room for improvement (although, in my mind, none of the subscriber services offers anything that I personally want) and room for change. But, considering that this was the first year of a serious online music store backed not only by a name in technology, but by most of the names in the record industry, the Music Store has done well. Here's hoping Apple continues to work to make it better, to keep the prices low, and to expand that library of music.

Read Wired's article on the Music Store.

Posted by zombyboy at April 29, 2004 02:19 PM | TrackBack