p2pnet - rss feed: Will iTunes dominate the world?
p2p news view / p2pnet: Apple’s claim to fame is the iPod, a music player which isn’t different from any other but which, thanks to the Net, viral marketing and mindless mainstream media adoration, has become the Sony Walkman of the first part of the 21st century.
iTunes is to the iPod what film used to be to cameras. You couldn’t have one without the other. Then digital cameras came along and film is on its way out. And when the Big Four Organized Music cartel members finally release their full catalogues and reduce their ridiculous wholesale prices, as they must, sooner or later, iTunes will instantly become passé.
Established and amateur artists of all ilks are using the Net to tell the world about themselves and their work while the major labels, which have been in total control for so long, struggle in vain to keep up, and keep hold of what they used to have. But eventually, they’ll have to do something they’ve never had to do before.
Compete.
And this in turn means they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming to the open market place.
The Net decrees it.
They may, or they may not, remain at the top of the heap. Time will tell.
But now, they won’t be alone.
People are queasy
In a what at first appears to be a fulsome paen to Apple and the iPod, “The free file-swapping sites that started with Napster (which the courts shut down) and continued with Limewire and the various Bit-torrent [sic] sites, are still seeing plenty of pirate traffic, but a growing number of people are queasy about that,” writes Alan Kohler in Australia’s The Age.
“Also, the free files are often mangled and it is hard to find what you want. As the iPods/digital music phenomenon goes mainstream, so legitimate sales of digital entertainment via the internet are booming as well.
“With iPods and iTunes, Steve Jobs and his team at Apple have created a beautifully functional closed system for selling and consuming digital music and video that looks to be heading for total dominance.”
Far from being queasy, every day more and more people are opening new Net accounts and logging on to the p2p networks, thanks to Warner Music, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal and EMI whose attempts to stifle file sharing and p2p have in fact publicized them to the world at large.
Kohl says, “legitimate sales of digital entertainment via the internet are booming”.
By that, he presumably means corporate sales, but as p2pnet posted in January, “Echoing hollowly would be a more accurate phrase, and that’s entirely due to the fact the Big Four - Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI – are sticking to their physical 1970s business model in the digital 21st century.”
Not only is the corporate online music buisiness not booming, it doesn’t yet even exist.
Making no impression
To all reasonable intents and purposes, iTunes is the only corporate music service out there. And it isn’t even a service. It’s a 100% restricted, wholly owned, single-purpose, self-funding loading application for iPods.
The only genuine sales applications such as the seriously troubled Napster #2 are making no impression whatever on the huge independent online music scene which dominates the music world.
Kohler’s “Closed system” is the way Steve Jobs likes it. But it won’t last. Events in France mean there’s a strong likelihood Jobs’ DRM C.R.A.P. will go down the iTubes, and even if there’s a reprieve, where France leads, others countries - the new market places - will surely follow.
The Net is still growing and literally billions of people have yet to sign up to go online.
All the attention is currently on Apple, but there are many, many other vested interests also vying to gain complete control of what people hear, see and do, and the means by which they do it.
The corporate entertainment and software cartels hope to stop the rot: stop people from having freedom of choice and freedom of expression. But it’s already far too late. Blogs and citizen news sites reporting, untrammelled by corporate self-interest, are telling it like it really is.
Corporations such as Google have read the writing on the wall and with Google to the fore, will try to create their own rigidly controlled internets.
But they’re too late as well.
Meanwhile, although iPod has captured most of the market, other multi-functional devices which allow their users to play music, show video, make phone calls, send text messages and surf the web, are arriving. Fast.
And unlike the iPod, they’re not, in and of themselves, $400 DRM money machines.
Parallel universes
“The shock troops for Microsoft’s victory over Apple in personal computers in the 1980s were Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Toshiba and so on - that is the chip manufacturer and the cheap PC makers that licensed the Windows operating system,” Kohler adds.
“With digital music and video it will be Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson - the mobile phone manufacturers.
“This year they will start releasing phones with the same storage as iPods - up to 30 gigabytes. iPods themselves will have to become phones.
“Microsoft’s software will power the new generation of phone/music players, and the business of selling digital songs and TV shows will open up. Google will probably run the most popular online store, but there will be thousands.
“The iPod/iTunes system will move into a niche with Macintosh computers because Steve Jobs has again stuck with closed architecture and total control. This will happen quickly because mobile phones are being turned over about every year.
“It is quite a thrilling time to be alive.
“We will witness the creation and destruction of a market dominance in the time it used to take to work up a business plan.”
We will indeed.
And immediately alongside them, a truly independent parallel universe populated by creators who aren’t driven by pathalogical addictions to more of what they already have.
In one universe, cash ‘consumers’ will continue to mindlessly consume, spending their money on cookie-cutter product churned out endlessly by the corporate entertainment and software cartels.
In the other, ‘customers’ will exercise free choice, using open source applications or buying from independent innovators, all the while listening to music and watching films made by genuine vcreators.
No need to stay tuned.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
Also See:
The Age - Apple tunes in to world domination, April 1, 2006
C.R.A.P. - Apple and its C.R.A.P., March 4, 2006
logging on - Alberto Gonzales’ school horror show, March 31, 2006
Echoing hollowly - IFPI file sharing report, January 19, 2006
down the iTubes - Apple: foiled in France, March 28, 2006
April 1st, 2006 at 7:48 pm
It’s already dominating the world… at 70% market share.
April 1st, 2006 at 11:21 pm
yeah and in Australia digital sales are booming at around 1.31% of the market share
April 2nd, 2006 at 1:26 am
I ain’t queasy about anything. And I’m so tired of hearing about iTunes.
April 2nd, 2006 at 1:44 am
The cartels had their chance to supply music at low prices and failed. I’m now past all that and will never buy anything in the future from them.
I enjoy all my music/movies/tv-shows completely free and, thats the way it’s staying. People can buy from itunes if they like, doesn’t bother me in the slightest, personally i like the freedom i have now, which comes at a cost of $0.
April 2nd, 2006 at 5:49 am
“Apple’s claim to fame is the iPod” - mmmm. So not: popularising the GUI, initiating home computing, industrial design, integration, user friendliness, slower processors (in the past) etc etc. I get the impression you don’t like Apple or iTunes. Thing is, it’s a pretty good computing experience, and works well. You might want to try it sometime. iTunes is free, and you’ll be used to not paying for things via P2P…
in terms of dreaded “market dominance”, there are many choices out there available for people, even including buying CD’s and ripping them. This is a free market, and people freely vote with their money and their mouse. iTunes and iPod are just popular - people like this software and hardware combination. Is that your real problem? There is no shortage of ‘net outlets for independent creators - I know - I’m one of them. I’ll still be selling my work on iTunes as well though. Market success isn’t evil, it’s just success.
April 2nd, 2006 at 9:26 am
About a month ago the number of mobile phones that play music overtook the number of ipods/PMPs. The iPod/pmp is no longer the dominant mobile music player.
At around the same time, sales of music (full tracks not ringtones) direct to mobile phones overtook iTunes.
The reason we don’t see either of these things is because they’re not happening in the USA or Europe. They’re happening in the far east.
Meanwhile AllOfMp3 continues to rise and they’ve just released a tool for buying AllOfMp3 tracks on a Symbian phone.
As regards pricing models. Cheap and Easy beats Free and Hard. If you have a choice of searching the P2P networks, completing the download, tidying the tags and filenames or just going to AllOfMp3 and paying £0.10 per track, which do you choose? If time is no object, and you don’t mind the hassle, then it’ll be P2P, for everyone else we don’t mind paying a small sum but we don’t like being ripped off.
When 2nd run CDs can be had for $5-8 and DVDs are $10-$20, iTMS tracks at $0.99 each just look way too expensive. What we will see (with everyone kicking and screaming in the process) is a gradual drop in price for everything but the first 3 months of Hit Singles, to a natural level. That level is somewhere between $0.10 and $0.30 per track. At that point, overall sales will start to approach the same level of activity as P2P.
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:50 am
It just struck me, there is actually a difference between the 2nd run physical CD and the online one.. almost zero distribution cost for keeping it in circulation online vs. a definite cost and occupied shelf space when it’s not selling. you could argue therefore that there is *less* of an arguement to discount older songs (to the same rate)online as the label and store don’t have to worry about inventory costs and limited shelf space being taken from higher return items. I do kinda agree that prices should really vary to fairly reflect the market but we have to recognise that this isn’t the physical market so it doesn’t have to necessarily directly reflect it just because we are used to it.
Also I agree with the next poster abot the original article:
> I get the impression you don’t like Apple or iTunes.
> Thing is, it’s a pretty good computing experience, and works well.
I’m a happy listener, I continue to buy things when I want from the outlets I choose (my local record store, itunes, warchild + blogs)
April 3rd, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Made me laugh on a Monday!
Thanks…
Calling iPod/iTunes “closed” - while lauding p2p and Microsoft for bein open is the “standard” response to the iPod dominance.
Nevermind that music on iTunes can be ripped to a DRM free MP3 in about the same or less time than it takes to find a “good” version on a p2p network. Is my time and my computers and kids security worth 99c or $9.99? If music were to be “free” then why not food, housing, why even you whole life could just be “free” - why pay for anything?
p2pnet is purely to promote p2p networks - hopefully those who read this article will realize it.
And I dont even have an iPod!!
April 3rd, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Is there a reason why allomp3.com is based in Russia ?
Are you a bit naive?
Is there a reason why most hardcore and kiddie porn sites are based in Russia and Eastern europe?
Is there a reason why there is utter lawlessness and collapse of societies in many such Eastern Europe countries that coincidently host these illegal-in-the-rest-of-the-world sites?
I cant believe people still hyping allofmp3.com as if this is the business model to be followed - base your company out of the reach of law and hope that the country will not have extradition proceedings with others.
How naive CAN you be?
AM
April 4th, 2006 at 7:44 am
It seems that it’s impossible to have a reasoned debate about iPods, Apple, DRM, P2P and Music. Every conversation descends into the same bollox as debates about USA Politics.
Just stand back a moment and look at AllOfMp3 purely as a web service and ignore where it’s located and questions about it’s legality or otherwise when used from round the world. It just works. It just works at least as well as iTMS. And for the customer there are clear advantages that AllOfMp3 has over iTMS.
Now imagine AllOfMp3 transplanted into the west and with a pricing model that charged the same as iTMS for the first 3 months after a track’s release and then falling to AllOfMp3’s current pricing. Do you want to bet that it wouldn’t be hugely successful? Now try and imagine a world where the major record labels understood that this means they don’t need to lock everything up with DRM. That what they need to do is to give the customer a product they want at a price they’ll pay.
Yeah, I know. Never going to happen, is it.
Now since that hasn’t happened yet, I personally have a choice. I can buy CDs from Amazon and rip them myself. I can buy expensive, low quality, DRMed files for download from iTMS. I can buy cheap, high quality, non-DRM files from AllOfMp3, paying via paypal. I can run the gauntlet of P2P and spend lots of time that I don’t have to find, download, tidy, clean, rename, “free” files. Guess which option I take?