I would have to echo the people saying that Amazon is their preferred store. I use it more because of the mp3 format and the lack of DRM. With the mp3 format I can play the songs on just about any device without converting it. Even with iTunes Plus tracks they are still AAC so not many devices or software players can play them.
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Apple iTunes Still #1, but Amazon Gaining
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i agree with both of you. the current working model is unfair. some companies are getting unfair advantage over others for selling the exact same product. i guess this is the free market at work, but yeah, until they play fair, why should the consumer?
Whatever...it all just sells more iPods and iPhones!
I don't know if Apple puts much into these rankings anyway. They only use it to sell more iPods/iPhones. They have described it as a "break-even" business. I am sure they want more DRM-free stuff but the record companies obviously have worked out something much better with Amazon. Probably and 85%/15% split vs. the 70%/30% they get with Apple. That would make all the difference to the record buffoons. But Apple doesn't care. Amazon sells DRM-free(read: iPod/iPhone friendly) so if Apple is still number 1 with "MP3" players. So they win. Buy from iTunes for your iPod, buy from Amazon for your iPod. Same 35% gross profit and a $200 ring at the register. And the more iPhones they sell the more people just keep buying apps., and hey why not grab a few songs while your their.
I still think the record companies should get over things. This all seems like sour grapes. When Universal took away the NBC shows on iTunes I was just dumbfounded. That was just extra revenue. Too many fears/egos getting in the way. It probably doesn't help that they have to negotiate with Steve Jobs. In spite of what ever Buddhist practice he may have had he seems like a bit of a prick to deal with. Love his company though! Namasté Steve!
I don't know if Apple puts much into these rankings anyway. They only use it to sell more iPods/iPhones. They have described it as a "break-even" business. I am sure they want more DRM-free stuff but the record companies obviously have worked out something much better with Amazon. Probably and 85%/15% split vs. the 70%/30% they get with Apple. That would make all the difference to the record buffoons. But Apple doesn't care. Amazon sells DRM-free(read: iPod/iPhone friendly) so if Apple is still number 1 with "MP3" players. So they win. Buy from iTunes for your iPod, buy from Amazon for your iPod. Same 35% gross profit and a $200 ring at the register. And the more iPhones they sell the more people just keep buying apps., and hey why not grab a few songs while your their.
I still think the record companies should get over things. This all seems like sour grapes. When Universal took away the NBC shows on iTunes I was just dumbfounded. That was just extra revenue. Too many fears/egos getting in the way. It probably doesn't help that they have to negotiate with Steve Jobs. In spite of what ever Buddhist practice he may have had he seems like a bit of a prick to deal with. Love his company though! Namasté Steve!
Cd
I haven't bought a CD since like... 1997. I can't even remember what it was like when we had record stores in the mall. Now, its all just a mighty-mouse click away.
iTunes could use more music however. They do lack some more of the interesting obscure stuff.
I haven't bought a CD since like... 1997. I can't even remember what it was like when we had record stores in the mall. Now, its all just a mighty-mouse click away.
iTunes could use more music however. They do lack some more of the interesting obscure stuff.
Wal-mart is nothing more a than a slave trader who destroys communities, attracts crime and customers of lower intelligence. This useless human soul sucker will fall further as more people how horrible it is to support such a useless inbreed customer experience.
Shop at Wal-Mart to save a nickel? Well then your I.Q just dropped 10 points while you support unfair labor practices. Great Job!
Gee, how do you really feel? I agree that Wal-mart has some terrible practices. But for many in this country shopping at Wal-mart is the only way they can get the products they need and still put gas in the car and heat their homes. The question is always how much bad do we have to do in order to do good? Most every company has "blood" on their hands in some way. Did you know that Wal-mart sells more organic food than any other company? But I still can't shop there, but I am lucky to have options. Many do not. So maybe not a good idea to call people stupid because of their circumstance!
I never buy a song on iTunes anymore without checking Amazon first, for the same reasons everyone else before has mentioned (cheaper, drm free, etc).
iTunes does have the bigger library, but sometimes I luck up and the obscure song I'm looking for is on Amazon too, for $0.89.
It's a no brainer...
iTunes does have the bigger library, but sometimes I luck up and the obscure song I'm looking for is on Amazon too, for $0.89.
It's a no brainer...
Proof? AAC is generally held to be better quality than MP3, though it's not quite that cut and dried. Either way, saying they are of a "much higher quality" is wrong.
What's obscure about AC3? The only thing that makes iTunes songs hard to move around is the DRM. AC3 is a perfectly transferable.
Then don't buy the stuff that isn't iTunes+.
WTF? Apple can't sell stuff DRM free if the labels wont license it to them. The majority of the big labels are trying screw Apple at of business by licensing DRM free music to Amazon, but not to Apple. Every purchase made at Amazon therefore is vote of confidence in the record industry's desire to regain control over the distribution model. They just rely on clueless, or thoughtless idiots going along with it, and they thank you for doing your part.
"Apple iTunes undisputed leader; Target drops down even further" would also have been true.
KingYaba sheesh
What a ridiculous, ignorant comment. Learn your history. All land has been disputed, fought over, at one time or another. Who you going to choose as the "rightful" owner? I suppose you're willing to give the US back to England aye?
What a ridiculous, ignorant comment. Learn your history. All land has been disputed, fought over, at one time or another. Who you going to choose as the "rightful" owner? I suppose you're willing to give the US back to England aye?
But I believe the point he is trying to make is that Amazon's 256kbps MP3 sound much better than 128kbps AAC files. I agree with this and I would buy my music through Amazon first over iTunes. It just sounds much better even though the file is twice as large.
Though if the music was available at 256kbps AAC, then yet this should sound better than the 256kbps MP3 due to the more advanced codec.
On the whole I am really loathed to buy music with a lossy codec and I which it was possible to buy in DRM free ALAC with the capability reencode to the bitrate AAC of your choice when transferring to the iPod.
It would be the same thing if Apple sold music with DRM removed without permission of the record labels. Apple doesn't do that.
When you compare this with Psystar, in each case we have a company (or companies) that wants to license their product in a certain way, with another company not quite happy about it. Psystar did go ahead and use the product without license, Apple didn't. The real question, often missed in the Psystar threads, is: Is it anti-competitive? Is it preventing a company from competing?
In the case between Apple and record labels, I am not sure, but Apple isn't suing anyone, so it seems to be Ok. I think an important factor is that the iPod is so strong in the market, and it could be argued that both Apple and Amazon have a license that allows the music to be played in iTunes, on an iPod, and to be copied to an audio CD, and the DRM only prevents the end user from doing things that are illegal anyway.
Without knowing Amazon's CD/MP3 sales ratio, it's hard to draw an absolute here.
The bigger problem for Apple is simply exposure. If, and again, without any numbers this is a big 'if'[1] Amazon is really gaining market share based purely on its MP3 store, then for a new service, that has nowhere near the brand recognition of iTunes, that's quite the jump. As more people[2] learn that Amazon sells MP3s that they can easily use in any flavour of media player, their growth could accelerate rapidly. With a little momentum, it'd take Amazon far less time to jump iTunes, than it took iTunes to attain the number one slot. iTunes needed to create the market, but now that market is in place, Amazon just needs to be cheaper, which it typically is.
[1] Target's sales have been dropping in general. Did Amazon leap above Target, or did Target sink below Amazon?
[2] Man in the street, not vaguely tech savvy teen.
Is that your educated guess? or you have proof?
How do we know this is not because Apple want too large of the fractions of the $$$ from the sales, and holding users hostage? Apple is notorious for its greedy behavior in cutting into partner's profit.
Want to defend apple? throw proof at me please.
Again, anybody has any sale numbers of these top 5 stores?
The iTunes+ stuff *is* at a higher bit rate though. 256kbps if memory serves. Amazon's MP3s are higher still, but in my subjective tests I can't really tell the difference. The 128kpbs AC3s predictably sound like crap though.
I don't know why Apple don't sell all of their library at 256kbps, and leave the '+' demarkation to signify DRM free, but they may simply not have license to do that either.
As for lossless, be that FLAC or ALAC, I totally agree, though I imagine the bandwidth costs would quickly push the price of the music above that of the CD. What people don't often realize is that the labels typically make more money from digital sales where they net around 75-80% of the sales price, than they do from CD sales, where they shoulder the cost of manufacture and distribution, and take a lesser cut of the final sales price. I doubt the labels would agree to let Apple, or Amazon negotiate prices in line with high street stores, since that gives up control of the distribution model, which leaves digital sellers too little a cut to pay for the serious bandwidth cost of servicing ~400MB album downloads.
You're right. I should have placed a claimer stating my thoughts are for those who have several options other Wal-Mart.
Amazon keeps your media purchases for redownload
In addition to the advantage of DRM-free music, all downloadable media (including Kindle ebook files) purchased from Amazon.com are kept in your account's "Media Library", so you can redownload it free of charge if something happens to the copy you have on your hard drive. As far as I can determine, there is no way to do this in iTunes Store. You have to buy it again. I think iTunes presents a very good shopping experience, but it's simply not competitive with Amazon anymore.
In addition to the advantage of DRM-free music, all downloadable media (including Kindle ebook files) purchased from Amazon.com are kept in your account's "Media Library", so you can redownload it free of charge if something happens to the copy you have on your hard drive. As far as I can determine, there is no way to do this in iTunes Store. You have to buy it again. I think iTunes presents a very good shopping experience, but it's simply not competitive with Amazon anymore.
I like very much iTunes but it is difficult to accept some very news CDs with DRM.
I would love if all news CDs just come in the iTunes Plus format.
Another thing: I can't accept 128kps. I don't care about data space. Hard disk is very cheap today. No discuss about quality in 128 kps.
In the past I bought some CDs and after 3 months I receive an "update message to iTunes Plus". That's terrible. I loose all information about Star, how many times played; and I don't like to leave duplicated music in my Library.
Unfortunately, I can not buy from Amazon in Belgium.
I hope in a very soon future, Apple can provide news CDs just in iTunes Plus.
I would love if all news CDs just come in the iTunes Plus format.
Another thing: I can't accept 128kps. I don't care about data space. Hard disk is very cheap today. No discuss about quality in 128 kps.
In the past I bought some CDs and after 3 months I receive an "update message to iTunes Plus". That's terrible. I loose all information about Star, how many times played; and I don't like to leave duplicated music in my Library.
Unfortunately, I can not buy from Amazon in Belgium.
I hope in a very soon future, Apple can provide news CDs just in iTunes Plus.
It's something of an open secret in the industry, and has been alluded to by various industry higher-ups in various articles and interviews. I don't have anything to hand here, and I don't have time to search, so you'll have to take that for what it is.
That said:
The impression given out is always that it wasn't really about profit percentage (more anon), but about pricing structure. In the same way the Apple fell out with Universal about flexible pricing, the majors wanted the option to sell music at tiered prices, with newer songs being more than 99c for some period of time. I believe some labels also disliked the cherry picking of songs from albums and wanted to be able to sell songs at different prices within albums.
Either way, as has been well documented, Apple were pretty determined to keep the 99c price fixed, and they had the clout to make that happen. That made them enemies.
As for sales percentages, a few thoughts:
Firstly, rumour has it (given that no-one really knows) that Amazon is paying a higher percentage to the labels than Apple. However, given that Amazon is also selling for less, it may well be that in pure dollar terms both companies are paying the same sum to labels, and Apple is just marking the price up a little higher. So it might really not be the case the labels have a sweeter deal with Amazon.
Secondly, the advantage of being the dominant player is always that you get better deals than the lower volume sellers. WalMart's entire business model runs on this. If Apple weren't able to get songs for cheaper than Amazon, given that Amazon was way behind in sales volume when the MP3 store was launched, something would be very wrong. Oh, wait, Apple didn't get as a good a deal as Amazon, since Amazon have DRM free from all of the majors, so something *is* a little wrong...
Proof?
Not especially. They played a better game of poker than the majors, and I respect that at a business level. As a consumer, I don't feel better for it though. For all Steve likes to talk about a DRM free world, and how his hands are tied, the labels shot themselves in the foot by mandating DRM, as it gave Apple exactly the kind of lock-in it needed to build some serious momentum.
I don't get this at all. How difficult is Amazon? Seriously? All you do is navigate to the Mp3 store (just like iTunes), search/navigate/whatever to the artist/album/song you want (just like iTunes). Click BUY, done.
What's so different? Oh that's right, Amazon's music is DRM free, whereas the majority of iTunes is still not.
People should blame the RIAA for not letting more DRM free music to iTunes, but honestly, this "99 cent" thing needs to go. Imho, at this point, it's Apple's own arrogance that's preventing them from getting DRM free music.
w00master