OD2: iTune’s European competition
p2pnet.net News:- Insofar as corporate online music exists in the US, Apple holds all the cards with iTunes, the loss-leading music service it’s using to market its iPod music players.
Because although a number of other of Big Music supplied ’services’ with Roxio / Napster II to the fore would dearly like to think otherwise, there’s really no other contender.
iTunes is slated for Europe but when it arrives, it’ll find its only serious competitor ready and waiting.
The Peter Gabriel / Microsoft OD2 collaboration, already firmly entrenched throughout Europe as the primary corporate music presence, today revealed its SonicSelector digital music jukebox – the first ‘pay-as-you-go’ model under which users can stream tracks for a penny each.
“Users can mix their own playlists by selecting their favourite artists or genres,” says OD2. “Then, with one click, they can create hours of personalised playlists for just 1p a track.”
Apple’s iTunes site states, “You agree to abide by such other terms and conditions, including where applicable representing that you are of sufficient legal age to use or participate in such service or feature.” Neither the OD2 site nor its statement say if there’s a sign-up age limit.
Be that as it may, although OD2 is kicking off with a special launch offer starting at 38p (about 69 cents) songs will ultimately cost from 75p (about $1.36) per track. However, the more tracks people buy, the cheaper the unit price will be.
Apple will probably come in at around 99p per track (about $1.79) and against that, Roxio’s Napster II is offering the same Big Five ‘product’ at 1.09 pounds (about $1.94).
Running on Windows Media Player 9, “SonicSelector is a proprietary plug-in created by OD2 which creates a complete on demand music service,” it states. “It allows consumers to seamlessly browse an online store, stream and download tracks, burn copies to CD, or transfer this content to more than 70 different portable music devices.”
However, users must be running Microsoft’s WMP 9, and OD2 is only offering a measly 350,000 tracks from 12,000 artists, although there’s “very strong local European catalogue representation”.
As usual, the only real winner is Big Music which is managing to supply the same ‘product’ to a slew of different online retailers around the world. Just like it used to in the good old pre-Napster days.
June 14th, 2004 at 7:15 pm
iTunes will chew them up and spit them out. The service isn’t the centerpiece. It’s the player.
NOTHING!! compares with the iPod. Simply put “the iPod rocks”. So if you want an iPod, and by the sales numbers everyone does because they are ultra cool, then you need iTunes not one of these lame fakes.
Once again everyone else is following Apple, NOT leading.
Nuff Said