Apple iTunes 4.5 update
p2pnet.net News:- Yesterday, Apple announced the release of version 4.5 of its iTunes software. It also announced that its year-end iTunes sales target fell well short by 30% thanks, in part, to the failure of its Apple-Pepsi-RIAA promo.
It may appear that Apple is in the lead as it and other mainstream companies – many of them with absolutely no presence in the music markets, online or anywhere else – muscle each other fiercely for a lucrative spot on the Net.
That’s just the way it looks. however.
In reality, they’re all sitting in the same heap and they’re all buying from the same supplier to offer more or less the same product in more or less the same way to the same more or less ‘establishment’ customers at more or less the same prices.
They’re not doing well online (in North America, at least) so now they’ll follow where Roxio has already gone – into America’s universities.
Sony and Apple are at this point up first as numbers two and three, respectively, alongside Roxio’s seriously troubled Napster II which, in a total misread of potential, the Big Five labels plugged into Penn State as a kind of vanguard. Despite its presence at Penn and the University or Rochester, Napster II may or may not survive as an entity. Time will tell, but the odds are against it.
Sony will start horning in on Napster II next month with CAN – Campus Action Network.
“This is a particular passion of ours at Sony Music,” Sony Music Entertainment ceo Andrew Lack said a while back. “We’ve contacted, in the last couple of months, dozens of colleges and universities to introduce them to legitimate music services that can set up an easy student offering on their campuses and filter out the pirated material,” Lack said.
And Apple is getting in at university level with its ‘iTunes on Campus’ institutional site license program.
“Provide your students with the best legal solution to manage, acquire, and listen to music by participating in the iTunes on Campus program,” it says here. “This program provides an institutional site license for iTunes and materials you can use for student communications. The program is easy-to-administer and is free.”
So who’ll win?
Only the entertainment industry because the truth is – it doesn’t matter in the slightest because it’s all part of a Hollywood act to give the appearance of competition, and it’s been going on for years.
Ultimately, like the supposed ‘online music stores,’ the school direct sales points will all be supplied and supported by Big Music. And they’ll all be trying to palm off tracks from the same arid catalogues.
But that’s not the bad part.
In fact, online music stores in or out of school systems are no more than small cogs in in the Hollywood Green Machine’s plan to gain complete control of every aspect of how people enjoy their leisure hours.
And of course, students at all levels are the consumers of the future so it’s of paramount importance for Hollywood to get them while they’re still young and naive and likely to believe excreta smells of roses if Hollywood says it does.
April 30th, 2004 at 12:46 am
it scares me to think some people will view this as a viable news source.
you lost me when you said that apple wasn’t succeeding w its online store.
not only are they making a little profit from the store, the store hooks people into the ipod, which is arguably the hottest selling $400 computer on earth. Apple’s only problem is producing the damn things fast enough.
909% increase in ipod sales.. that’s pretty nice.
yes napster is sucking. as for sony, they’ve got a little conflict-of-interests problem…despite a gorgeous brand that will help them in online ventures..
oops..their pushing minidisc.. nevermind