RE: Dumb iTunes Question - Wal-mart - Billy Ocean

["Montgomery, Daniel E." <Montgomery@Mackinac.org>]

Wal-mart has a download service, also, for non-iPod users, and the songs are only 88 cents. Of course, those songs are in Windows Media Format (which is proprietary). You'd have to burn those Walmart-purchased songs to a disk and then reburn them to mp3 to transfer to another device.

Let's see... my first iTunes download.... Billy Ocean's "They'll be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)"

-----Original Message-----
From: Troy Miller [mailto:yort5thor@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 10:27 PM
To: over-the-rhine@actwin.com
Subject: Re: Dumb iTunes Question


Brad Caviness wrote:

> OS X and OS 9 (IX?) are completely different beasts, I understand. I 
> think OS X is Linux based, even.

Well, not quite. Let's just say "Unix"-based.

> My thought, really, was (setting aside that the iTunes store is a 
> marketing device to sell more iPods, especially to windows users) that 
> Apple could make more money by formating some of their products to be 
> more cross-platform.

They really don't have much of an incentive. I think the numbers I saw 
were something like a 70% share of the portable media market. The fact 
is, most people who have these sorts of things have iPods.

And as somebody alluded to, nobody's making any money off downloadable 
songs, at least not yet. It's solely to drive hardware sales. If iTunes 
songs played on a competitor's product, they're out moola.

That's not to say that iTunes is really restrictive. I mean, if you're 
going to be doing downloadable music for money, you pretty much have to 
use a proprietary codec with DRM (Digital Rights Management) - in other 
words, some sort of protection to make sure you don't just download a 
song and then share it with the world. Apple went with their AAC (which 
IIRC corretly is just a souped up version of MPEG-4), which is a dang 
nice codec.

And let's not forget, iPods are *not* limited to iTunes songs. It'll 
happily play any mp3s you have lying around from times past. 
(Unfortunately, it won't play my geek-snob format, Ogg Vorbis, so I have 
a Neuros).

Oh, and Apple recently partnered with HP to put out a HP-branded iPod 
sometime soon. What with that and the iPod Mini (which they say they 
have 100,000 orders for), they're in pretty good shape at the moment!

But hey, if you've got a non-iPod, there are plenty of other places to 
check out for downloadable music (Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, etc).

Troy
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