Apple 'iTunes Producer'

[Jerry Spoon]

Originally posted by voicegy
I wonder if that means The Most Talented Female Singer in the World will be able to post directly to iTunes? Oh, I HOPE so!

http://www.wingmusic.co.nz/

Wow!!! Celine Dion sure has gone all to hell!

 

[mrsebastian]

this has such freakin potential, i love it!!! this is what we were talking about in another thread the other day. keep the hits coming apple, at the rate they're going they may take over the industry!

 

[Phil Of Mac]

Working from the assumption that Apple will accept direct submission from artists, a few points:

1. They can still filter crap. By crap, it's not Steve Jobs as CEO single-handedly sitting there deciding whether or not he likes it. It's more like filtering out stuff like, say, me singing, which would be an utter disaster.

Originally posted by paulwhannel
funny stuff i still think AR will lose a court case. or apple will buy them out, or something...

That might work. Apple Records becomes part of Apple Computer, and becomes the in-house record label for Apple for the direct submissions from artists.

Originally posted by rjstanford
One comment - read that again. For everyone who's so quick to bash the record labels, they really do provide services (such as legal defence, tour promotion, etc) that may be out of reach for many startup bands. They also charge the bands a huge amount of their potential money for basically being on retainer and doing these things. Its a trade-off, like so much of life.

Having said that, anything to streamline contributions assuming some sort of filtering/approval mechanism (for technical quality if nothing else) is a very cool rumor.

This is really my main point: that with Apple handling the distribution, the record labels are going to have to change their practices. They're going to have to be a better value for the artist. This will make things better for everyone, like all innovation does.

 

[djfreak]

iTunes Producer

Well this is a critical discussion and I am glad to see many people joining in.

We have a similar thread going on over at osxaudio.com that everyone should check out.

I know I am not alone as an artist when I say that

1. Yes I am a professional

2. I absolutely REFUSE to let ex-hippie conservative capitalist Steve Jobs be the judge of whether my music will sell on the net or not.

Now we have to remember that the only thing separating the AAC that I create with QT Pro and the Protected AAC (.m4b) that apple sells on the iTMS is the "protected" part. And oh how protected that encoding is. If I'm understanding things correctly, Apple uses server varification to keep track of the AAC authorizations.

Now that may be a tightly guarded secret but it's just too simple for Apple to keep to themselves forever. Currently, the authorization process is iTunes only (for iTMS) but that will not always be the case. As I pointed out over on osxaudio.com Apple is now far from the only company launching this kind of venture.

Microsoft, Napster, Liquid Audio, and Real Audio are just a few companies each having their own theft protection scheme. Now we all know by now that that will not fly. Customers are going to demand the same freedom that they had with CD's. There will have to be a universal standard for encoding theft protection into these files. As it is you can play non-apple protected AAC's in iTunes but not the other way around (duh - of course).

Now as for iTunes Producer - no they are not about to start opening the gates for everyone to start uploading songs but if the universal standard that I just discussed gets implimented and I think it will, then some company or another will be in charge of licensing the technology to protect these files and then you will pay someone to give you the software or they'll encode it themselves to some kind of standard or something like that. The point is the whole thing is going to have to loosen up.

I'm going to be keeping my ears out for further mention of iTunes Producer though.

Evan