Apple enter the music business

So that's it Apple move in the music business, after Microsoft few months ago who announced some interest with Hollywood ! Not sure about the 200 000 songs origin, but it could be coming from Vivendi Music bought by Apple. Anyway no mention of that on their site.



Read on Techdirt:

In one of the worst kept secrets coming out of Apple in years, today they announced their own downloadable music service, with deals with each of the major record labels so that they have 200,000 songs to offer at $0.99/song. My initial reaction is that this is a step closer, but it's still not there yet. This is really a "me too" music downloading system, patterned on previous (failed) attempts to do the same thing with only minor improvements. First, the number of songs isn't nearly high enough (though, of course, that will improve), and the price is still too high. What the service does right is let people move the songs to an iPod (which you would expect, of course) and let people burn songs to a CD as many times as they want. The service is currently limited to Apple machines, but that will change with time. The bigger issue is that this absolutely takes away the benefits of offering music online. First, music sharing applications let people discuss, sample, share, and discover new music. Forcing people to pay $1/song doesn't encourage me to explore new music at all. Second, by making a distributed peer-to-peer system, distribution costs are dropped to next to nothing. So, this is a nice step for the music industry, but it's still missing the point. People are coming out saying that this will change the music industry - but I don't see that just yet. The only real "innovation" here (and it's incremental) is that you can burn the songs you download to CD.

The other new stuff is the Ipod 30 Gb