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iTMS Tops One Quarter Billion Songs Sold

WM. said:
I have changed my thoughts on that site a little bit. It appears that it may actually be reasonably legal to buy from them (in the US). Apparently it's legal to import music recordings into the US for your own personal use, which is a plausible interpretation of what you're doing when you buy from allofmp3.com--you (legally) buy the songs in Russia and then (legally) import them into the US (IANAL, of course).

However, for me the most important issue is whether buying from allofmp3 is ethical, and specifically whether any of your money gets back to the artist. And here I think the answer is a lot clearer: NO. Your $0.05 per track or whatever goes into the site's bank account and stays there. That's the whole reason why they can sell so cheap--Russian copyright law allows works to be "performed" (something like that) with zero compensation for any copyright holders.

Now, one could argue that as a customer of a legal business you simply "expect" that they will operate ethically, and if they don't, well, that's not your problem. I suppose that's okay if you can do that and still sleep at night ;) , but I would rather buy a CD or off of iTMS and know that I'm doing the RIGHT thing, as opposed to just the technically legal thing. IMHO, buying from allofmp3 is no better than downloading from Kazaa or whatever--and perhaps worse, because you have the illusion of doing the right thing and compensating the artist without actually doing so, and you may or may not be supporting some shady Russians.

You mentioned that you buy things from iTMS and allofmp3, and I suppose that that addresses most of the ethical issues, aside from the possibly-supporting-the-Russian-Mafia thing.

FWIW
WM
Click to expand...

No way can this be legit. For Russian citizens, ok. But offering it worldwide, no f*** way. I mean, come on. Apple has to negotiate country to country and these guys just appear and it's okay with all countries' RIAA. The only reason why it's working for allofmp3 is that the RIAA lawyers are scared to fly to Russia. Who would want to be the first to come back in a wooden box.
 
dude, Apple is blowing everyone out of the water on this one.

They were first on the scene,
they have changed the music industry forever,
they've got the market cornered,
and they're music player has like 90% market share!

GO APPLE!
be aggressive B-E aggressive
B-E A-G-G R-E-S-S-I-V-E

First and ten do it again!....I mean...whoops!
 
dejo said:
Interesting theory but I think many people would like to see some scientific proof. I remember seeing an article a while back that looked at how lossless the Apple Lossless format was. It not only looked at file sizes by going from AIFF > Apple Lossless > AIFF but also used an audio program to compare the two waveforms to prove the re-encoded AIFF contained the exact same information as the original AIFF. But I can't seem to track that article down. I think it would be very interesting to see a similar approach to analyze AAC > AIFF > AAC.
Click to expand...
Apple Lossless is just that -- lossless. It applies a data compression algorithm (possibly a varient of LZW or Golomb coding ) highly optimized for audio. FLAC is another popular implementation of the concept. Both essentially ZIP an AIFF file which is then decompressed on the fly during playback -- you are listening to all of the original data, which is why the RIAA is unlikely to go for Apple Lossless downloads. Due to the Nyquist-Shannon Limit, however, you will seldom see an AIFF file reduced to less than half its original size when reencoded with Apple Lossless or FLAC. TANSTAAFL.

AAC and MP3, on the other hand, are psychoacoustic compression schemes. They are designed so that the audio components that you do hear and will pay the most attention to are the ones that are encoded with the most fidelity. The rest, however, are deliberately encoded at lower fidelity, reducing the amount of data needed for an "acceptable" reproduction of the original audio by an order of magnitude. The tradeoff is that the process is never perfect, and aliasing and other low-level audio artifacts are introduced. So when you go and lossily reencode the decoded, lossily compressed file, the codec goes and applies the same criteria to the artifacts -- compounding them.

Try it -- the degredation in audio quality becomes very apparent after only one or two passes.
 
WM. said:
I have changed my thoughts on that site a little bit. It appears that it may actually be reasonably legal to buy from them (in the US). Apparently it's legal to import music recordings into the US for your own personal use, which is a plausible interpretation of what you're doing when you buy from allofmp3.com--you (legally) buy the songs in Russia and then (legally) import them into the US (IANAL, of course).

However, for me the most important issue is whether buying from allofmp3 is ethical, and specifically whether any of your money gets back to the artist. And here I think the answer is a lot clearer: NO. Your $0.05 per track or whatever goes into the site's bank account and stays there. That's the whole reason why they can sell so cheap--Russian copyright law allows works to be "performed" (something like that) with zero compensation for any copyright holders.

Now, one could argue that as a customer of a legal business you simply "expect" that they will operate ethically, and if they don't, well, that's not your problem. I suppose that's okay if you can do that and still sleep at night ;) , but I would rather buy a CD or off of iTMS and know that I'm doing the RIGHT thing, as opposed to just the technically legal thing. IMHO, buying from allofmp3 is no better than downloading from Kazaa or whatever--and perhaps worse, because you have the illusion of doing the right thing and compensating the artist without actually doing so, and you may or may not be supporting some shady Russians.

You mentioned that you buy things from iTMS and allofmp3, and I suppose that that addresses most of the ethical issues, aside from the possibly-supporting-the-Russian-Mafia thing.

FWIW
WM
Click to expand...


I have no problem downloading both from Allofmp3.com and mp3search.ru for older stuff I have not been able to find on CD or on iTunes. I have been able to replace most of the tapes I had in the 80's by using these services. Things I had looked for on CD for years. If you can't buy it, the artists can't get your money. You would think that online stores would be the perfect way for the Record labels to put up their entire catalogs and make money of songs and albums that are out of print. They aren't making a penny off of these anyway, why not put them online and make what you can. Until they do this, I will use the "grey" sites to get stuff I can't get elsewhere.
 
Raid said:
Right now it appears that Apple is either tied up in legal matters that prevent certain songs from being offered in other countries and/or is operating under the false assumption that tastes in music are dependant solely on the country of residency.

I fail to see why certain songs/artists are available in one countries iTMS, yet not available in another. Its just good business to sell where there is demand and little in the way of expansion costs (I mean all they really need is to set up links to files right?). I think the disparity that I’m seeing in the different iTMS’s is more due to a lack of foresight in the legal agreements between Apple and Artist/Label.
:(
Click to expand...

This is all about licensing. Its not Apple's fault. There is nothing Apple can do about this. if the record labels say no, its no. Its just not Apple, it affects stores, radio stations, etc.

Each country and/or region is independent. So a new agreement has to be made in every country, and you might get the rights to a song/artist in one countrey, but not in the country next to it because the labels doesnt feel like it.

This is wwhy there is no "iTMS Europe" or "iTMS Asia" but is being worked on, on a country by country basis.
 
Sorry guys, but I have to rant . . .
All I can say is that groups like Metallica (my favorite), Evanescense (my 2nd favorite), and so on are most definitely smoking crack! When they don't put their music on the number one digital music download store with the best file security out there they have lost it (A $250,000,000 dollar industry so far)! I mean, come on, "protect the integrity of the album", as one of them was quoted saying. What kind of crap is that? If you only want to sell your songs by album, try and work out a deal with Apple to do it that way. Apple already offers thousands of songs as album only, why can't you (Metallica and others) settle for doing the same. I can tell you that personally I will never buy another CD unless it's combined with a DVD (like St. Anger). The DVD is all I would care about. The CD just gets ripped to AAC right away and I never see it again. Why do I want to pay for some disc that will just take up space in my already cramped house? Does anybody get what I'm saying here? Stop the insanity! :eek: :eek:

Again, sorry for the rant, but with this announcement it had to be done.
 
dejo said:
Interesting theory but I think many people would like to see some scientific proof. I remember seeing an article a while back that looked at how lossless the Apple Lossless format was. It not only looked at file sizes by going from AIFF > Apple Lossless > AIFF but also used an audio program to compare the two waveforms to prove the re-encoded AIFF contained the exact same information as the original AIFF. But I can't seem to track that article down. I think it would be very interesting to see a similar approach to analyze AAC > AIFF > AAC.
Click to expand...

Filesize doesn't immediately indicate quality. There's no doubt that recompressing a compressed stream compounds the compression artefacts.

Original Source -> AAC (or MP3 for that matter): As has been mentioned, psycho-acoustic methods are used to strip out frequences that the human ear's not going to miss. Then add in some other tricks (like Joint Stereo, where only one of the stereo channels are preserved (and compressed), then the other channel is represented as some data on how this channel differs from the first. Personally, Joint Stereo sounds terrible to me, but you mileage may vary.

Now, a couple of options:
AAC -> AIFF/WAV/etc
This will give a full-bitrate, uncompressed representation of the result of decompressing the AAC file. Usually, this'll be at the same bitrate/sampling frequency as an audio CD (44.1Khz, 16-bit). Note that a 3-min compressed AAC converted to AIFF will have the same file-size as the source audio if it was in AIFF format in the first place. However, the AAC->AIFF will be lower quality since it's the result of decompression... An AIFF in this case is just using more bits to describe lower quality sound.

*or*
AAC -> Apple Lossless/FLAC/Other Lossless codecs
Lossless audio compression is the same theory as .zip or .sit data files. You look for repetition in the file, and replace the repeated data with some symbolic representation which is shorter than the original. The idea is, you can decompress a losslessly-compressed data stream, and end up with a bit-for-bit identical copy of the original. Converting a 'lossy' compressed AAC to a lossless compression format by necessity means that at some point, you decompress the original (see above -- you're in the same position at this point as if you'd just converted to AIFF). This decompressed stream is then compressed losslessly. So you get smaller filesize as an uncompressed AIFF/WAV file. But at the end of the day, you've still only got a file which, once uncompressed, contains the artefacts of the original compression.

Burning to CD, then re-ripping will unquestionably lose yet more fidelity. The big question is: do you notice? If not, then the whole thing's a moot point!
 
fatfish said:
Not really convinced by this double compression arguement leading to really poor quality. I can appreciate a certain amount of loss, but why should it be all that much.

Does this make sense.

When the original file is encoded, the codec rips out information to leave a compressed file, I would imagine the codec is fairly selective about the info that it removes, otherwise you'll end up with something of no use. Converting to AIFF won't add any quality back into the file, but must add something to increase the file size. So when encoding the file for the second time I would have thought that the codecs are smart enough to simply remove the stuff that affects quality the least, ie the fluff added by the convertion to AIFF. I doubt very much that the codecs just remove information on a random basis.
Click to expand...

Actually, that's the problem. An approximation of the original might contain artifacts (and, in AAC, generally does). The approximation of the approximation, however, will try to approximate those artifacts, making them generally more significant, and will of course also introduce artifacts of its own. AAC artifacts aren't the result of a particular n-order waveform being the absolute best fit for the original; they are a result in the assumptions of the encoder and shortcuts to get that encoder within 95% of the best-possible-waveform representation.

Yes, in an ideal world you'd end up with the exact same bit-for-bit file after a cycle. However, that's not how the encoding algorithms work. For a visual demonstration of this, take a detailed cartoon image, save in low-quality JPEG, then open the JPEG and save again in low-quality JPEG.

For a very slightly (but certainly not perfectly) similar problem, see Moire patterns, which crop up precisely because of the precision of sampling, and go away with a more random sampling. But, again, that's not how the algoithms work.

Could you devise a decompress-recompress lossless AAC algorithm? Possibly, if you knew with perfect detail the original AAC encoding algorithm, and had a really large computer on hand to go through the best-fit algorithm for your output AAC waveform, AND were able to perfectly synch the 128kbps of the original with the 128kbps of the output (which would involve knowing very intimate details about both the decompression algorithm originally used and the CD reader currently being used). But, that's a whole lot of effort and money to put into saving $0.99 on a DRM'd download!
 
chimerical said:
Just wondering...does the 250 million include the free weekly singles and the Pepsi song downloads?
Click to expand...

RE free downloads, I suspect not. "...purchased and downloaded..."

For the Pepsi downloads: I am pretty sure those are counted in (as they were counted in the goal of selling 10M last year sometime). Essentially, Pepsi is buying each of those, whereas the free tracks are a promotion being sponsored by Apple itself.
 
100? 300 songs? pah! I'm over the 500 mark now... ...oh dear, just realised how much how much I've spent :eek: damn you Apple for wringing me dry! (but at least I'll see the receivers with a good soundtrack ;) )
 
lem0nayde said:
Man, not to be a negative Nelly, but I am SO sick of hearing about the iPod and the digital music revolution. Even Wired Magazine listed the iPod as "Tired" in it's funny Wired | Tired | Expired graphic in this months magazine (Firefox on the cover.)

I think Apple is teetering on the edge of overexposure. If they fall over the edge, they could find themselves in the sticky situation of having the iPod no longer be cool to own because it's so mainstream. Consumer backlash could ensue.

Just a thought. Good for them on selling so many songs though.
Click to expand...


WIRED is TIRED and has been for years espeically that tired/wired segment. I do agree though iPod is in danger of becoming over saturated, entrenched, pervasive, embedded, taken for granted.........wait a minute that's real success!!!!!!!!
 
WM. said:
However, for me the most important issue is whether buying from allofmp3 is ethical, and specifically whether any of your money gets back to the artist. And here I think the answer is a lot clearer: NO. Your $0.05 per track or whatever goes into the site's bank account and stays there. That's the whole reason why they can sell so cheap--Russian copyright law allows works to be "performed" (something like that) with zero compensation for any copyright holders.
FWIW
WM
Click to expand...

I heard that it was that anyone could broadcast whatever music they liked and then had to pay a fixed royalty to the broadcaster-royalty-people. Since the royality is similar to what you'd pay on Russian radio/tv (i think), it is *much* lower that CD royalties in the west (remember royalities here in the west are far lower for radio than CD/iTMS downloads). since anyone is allowed to broadcast the songs without permission from the lisencor of that song it means a site like allofmp3.com doesn't have to get permission from the rights holders of the music they sell, which they would probably never get.

I don't remember if the exact wording was 'broadcast', but it was something where it was perhaps a bit dubious, but still possible, that downloads could be catagorized under.
 
KCK said:
I've heard it depends on how many songs you buy at one time that determines if Apple makes any money. If you only buy one song a day then Apple loses money due to the cost of processing the credit card transaction. If you buy two songs a day ( or at a time) then Apple breaks even. Buying 3 or more songs at a time means that Apple makes a profit. At least that is what I remember reading someplace.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be surprised if you did this Apple didn't group payments together. For example, my email reciepts are grouped together. Obviously the first couple of times you use your card they'd probably check it, and they most likely attempt to authorize your card before each purchase, but probably wait a few days before actually charging it to see if you order anything else to group it with. Either way, i'm sure apple has a nice system worked out. (if you bought like one song a month they'd be forced to billing you one song at a time though, so they'd prolly loose money then).
 
Multi-compression theory tested: Loss is real!

Okay, I decided to verify for myself whether there is really is a noticeable difference when moving from AAC > AIFF > AAC > AIFF > AAC. And it's true! Everytime you re-encode to AAC, you lose a little more of the acoustic quality of the song. I doubted you guys but you are correct. I apologize. In fact, even when converting from AAC > AIFF, the waveforms are not exactly the same!

To be fair, the difference was less noticeable during the first AAC > AIFF > AAC trip than it was during the second. This is something that many users will only be doing. But the second time around, especially during louder sections, the quality was just not there.

P.S. If anyone is interested in a more detailed explanation of my (semi)scientific analysis, including Peak screenshots, let me know. I'll put together a webpage (similar to http://www.idmonsters.com/archives/2004/04/lossless_is_goo.php) with my findings.
 
"Even Jobs pointed out that there's no money to be made in selling music online."

That is absolutely the ultimate Jobsian RDF statement of all time.

The >>real<< prize is in selling music, not selling iPods. It's wonderful that iPods can be sold today at reasonably good profit margins, but controlling even 1/5 of the digital-music market going forward is as valuable a business as the entirety of Apple today.

It'd be about $6 billion annually. With a 5% profit margin, it'd make $300 million. Apple today is worth $22 billion (after subtracting cash). That $300 million profit chunk would be larger than what Apple made in the fiscal year ending last September.

People can believe whatever they want, but the reality is that upgrade cycles on devices to play the music will eventually lengthen and margins on devices will shrink -- hell, they already are shrinking. The buying of tracks >>and<< subscriptions is an "evergreen" type of business and is the one Apple wants to dominate.

Their unbelievable success in the device market to date is wonderful for the company and allows them the flexibility to become aggressive competitors -- e.g. taking the profit out of the flash market to hurt Creative and Rio. What continues to make no sense is the lack of aggressiveness in fleshing out the product line to offer something at every price / feature point like Creative does. Everyone who doesn't buy the iPod won't buy from iTMS, yet Creative -- which sells no music -- continues to understand the value of variety in the lineup.

I'm hoping Shuffle is just the beginning and that by year end we'll see a more full featured flash player (with screen, maybe voice record, et al.) above Shuffle, cheaper Shuffle (a bit, to make room for screen versions), $199 5GB mini, $249 10GB mini, 80GB at $599, with 60GB and 40GB coming down in price some (cheaper 40GB drive will make this happen). I have no real take on Photo, other than it needs a card slot to be relevant and appears very overpriced.
 
rogo said:
"Even Jobs pointed out that there's no money to be made in selling music online."

That is absolutely the ultimate Jobsian RDF statement of all time.
Click to expand...
Well said.

I think overtime that iPod sales will dwindle. At that point in time, I see iTunes opening up to other players and Apples DRM being offered on other players. However, Apple will hold out as long as possible.
 
applebum said:
I have no problem downloading both from Allofmp3.com and mp3search.ru for older stuff I have not been able to find on CD or on iTunes. I have been able to replace most of the tapes I had in the 80's by using these services. Things I had looked for on CD for years. If you can't buy it, the artists can't get your money. You would think that online stores would be the perfect way for the Record labels to put up their entire catalogs and make money of songs and albums that are out of print. They aren't making a penny off of these anyway, why not put them online and make what you can. Until they do this, I will use the "grey" sites to get stuff I can't get elsewhere.
Click to expand...

All right. But you should at least send an iTunes music request to Apple while you're at it. They do respond. I've seen it happen.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunes.html
 
This reminded me of the microsoft music store... I'd forgotten all about them. Wonder how they are doing....!!!?
 
Apparently napster are going to start movie downloads.

When iTMS follows suite it won't be too long until Apple add movie capability to iPod photo.

I'm surprised Apple didn't add quicktime capability to iPod photo... to play those home movies you recorded..
 
jettredmont said:
Actually, that's the problem. An approximation of the original might contain artifacts (and, in AAC, generally does). The approximation of the approximation, however, will try to approximate those artifacts, making them generally more significant, and will of course also introduce artifacts of its own. AAC artifacts aren't the result of a particular n-order waveform being the absolute best fit for the original; they are a result in the assumptions of the encoder and shortcuts to get that encoder within 95% of the best-possible-waveform representation.

Yes, in an ideal world you'd end up with the exact same bit-for-bit file after a cycle. However, that's not how the encoding algorithms work. For a visual demonstration of this, take a detailed cartoon image, save in low-quality JPEG, then open the JPEG and save again in low-quality JPEG.

For a very slightly (but certainly not perfectly) similar problem, see Moire patterns, which crop up precisely because of the precision of sampling, and go away with a more random sampling. But, again, that's not how the algoithms work.

Could you devise a decompress-recompress lossless AAC algorithm? Possibly, if you knew with perfect detail the original AAC encoding algorithm, and had a really large computer on hand to go through the best-fit algorithm for your output AAC waveform, AND were able to perfectly synch the 128kbps of the original with the 128kbps of the output (which would involve knowing very intimate details about both the decompression algorithm originally used and the CD reader currently being used). But, that's a whole lot of effort and money to put into saving $0.99 on a DRM'd download!
Click to expand...

I wasn't disagreeing that recompressing, previously compressed and decompressed files didn't loose you quality, I was just wondering whether it was as much as you lost in the first compression.

(trying to put it into numbers, but just notional numbers because I really have no idea of how you would measure loss of quality) My thoughts were that if compressing a file lost say 30% of the quality leaving you with say 70% of your original quality, decompressing back to the original format would still leave you with a file at 70% quality, but does it neccesarily follow that your second compression would loose you 30% of the 70% you have left (ie 49%). Or are the codecs smart enough (as I suspect they are) to leave you say 62% quality (still a loss, but not as much as the first time round.

This was really only a thought about something that had been raised in connection with the idea that by buying from iTMS you were stuck with itunes or a real loss of quality if you decompressed to CD and recompressed to a codec supported by other players. Actually I rather suspect that it is illegal to do that, even if the intention is honourable, although I suspect I'd do it, if they discontinued itunes or something (UNTHINKABLE)

However I wouldn't actually compress the CD I'd burnt with a lossy codec, because despite all I've said, I suspect I would either leave them uncompressed or use a lossless compression, because regardless of how much quality is lost by a second compression,I can actually tel the difference. And I'm one of those who's hearing isn't good enough to tell the difference on my equipment between iTMS d/l's and CD quality.
 
Stella said:
Apparently napster are going to start movie downloads.

When iTMS follows suite it won't be too long until Apple add movie capability to iPod photo.

I'm surprised Apple didn't add quicktime capability to iPod photo... to play those home movies you recorded..
Click to expand...

Don't know whether this is true, but it won't interest me for a good while to come.

If I was going to watch a movie on my mac's 30" screen, I'd want something much better than VCD quality. Never really paid much attention to VCD, it wasn't good enough for my old 21", but what size are they typically?, I know some come on 2 CD's, so we are talking 600-1200 Mb. Downloading will be a nightmare.

So after 4-5 Hrs you get a poor quality movie that you have to pay for - NO THANKS.

As for movies on an ipod, the screen on my p900 phone is bigger than the ipod screen, movies are a joke, it's only good for saying "look what I can do" and pretty soon the novelty wears off.

No doubt in time with more bandwith and satelite internet connections and better codecs things will change, but for now NO THANKS.
 
Stella said:
Apparently napster are going to start movie downloads.

When iTMS follows suite it won't be too long until Apple add movie capability to iPod photo.

I'm surprised Apple didn't add quicktime capability to iPod photo... to play those home movies you recorded..
Click to expand...

I think not.

Movie downloads as a hot item is years away. Apple will not be adding quicktime capability to the iPod anytime soon either.
 
so, i just looked to see how many song's i've purchased... and i haven't really checked since apple hit the 100,000,000 in the summer some time, but i have about 500 songs, in my library of a little more than 2500.
 
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