Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple iTunes Still #1, but Amazon Gaining

w00master said:
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.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the Amazon stores works great. I personally don't even like iTunes that much. The store is so-so for browsing, and the application is decent (not great) on OSX, it's pretty mediocre on Windows.
 
Chupa Chupa said:
1) I would be that guy that buys physical CDs and then converts to ALAC for home, and MP3 for the iPods. You can't do that with hardly any music d/l service I know of. I'm not paying $10 for a lossy album (though I have paid $10 before for a lousy album, but I didn't know at the time).

2) I think you meant Apple is unique to the list, not Amazon. Amazon does sell physical media, of course.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's been edited. Not much sleep last night.
 
I don't mind the DRM. I doubt I'll ever have more than 5 computers, and they play on all the authorized iPods/iPhones (5 currently) in my house.

I prefer MP3 format for its compatibility, but that's not a big deal either.

I do prefer the 256 encoding of Amazon's files.

However, the #1 reason I buy from Amazon, and absolutely will not buy from iTunes is that I can't run iTunes-purchased music through MP3Gain. "Sound Check" is not a worthy replacement.

I still use and love iTunes for renting movies, buying TV shows, and apps.
 
I still use iTunes

I still use iTMS now and then, but less than before.

DRM is my biggest complaint. I love the iTunes Application, but loathe DRM. I like to use my tunes in DJ mixes and DRM makes that a hassle.
 
Coincidentally...

I made my first Amazon mp3 purchase just yesterday (the album "Raising Sand" btw) and it was as easy as iTunes. I did have to download a small "helper application", which I usually avoid, but I'm willing to trust Amazon... and just like that, my album was downloaded AND in iTunes. For two bucks less, to boot. I'm not jumping the iTunes ship by any means, but I am excited to have an alternative that I'm comfortable with. Some may decry Amazon's navigability, but I disagree. It was the first time I'd ever navigated their MP3 site, and within five minutes I was done - downloading and all.

Looking forward to how this whole thing (online music) continues to evolve.
 
clevin said:
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?
Click to expand...

No proof, but make of these quotes what you will.

"Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the Warner Music Group chairman, told Goldman Sachs investors in New York last week he was considering removing DRM from Warner's music downloads -- this just months after suggesting Warner would never abandon DRM. He blamed Apple for the apparent change of heart.

"We need some online competition" for Apple's iTunes Music Store, Bronfman said.
Click to expand...

David Pakman, chief executive officer of eMusic, the world's second-largest online downloading site (in terms of number of downloads), says Apple's stronghold, not consumer choice, is the reason why Sony and Warner will follow their competitors and soon remove DRM from individual downloads.

"They need to have a lot of successful retailers or they won't have a growing market," Pakman said. "You can't satisfy consumers if there is only one place to buy music. In every industry, you see market growth when there are lots of different places to buy the product."
Click to expand...


the company’s spokesman Peter LoFrumento explained that UMG isn't selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes for now so it could use the Apple store as a control group for measuring the impact on pricing, piracy and sales.
Click to expand...


"Our industry is going through a 'massive transformation,' maybe even much greater than any other industry has ever faced," Bronfman said. "But the industry has yet to realize the full implications from the impact of mobile, which so far is just ringtones. The industry has yet to see the implications of what impact digital downloads will have once competitors to iTunes are established. Nor has the industry yet seen the impact of subscription models, which are still in the early stages of development."
Click to expand...
 
w00master said:
Imho, at this point, it's Apple's own arrogance that's preventing them from getting DRM free music.
Click to expand...

They have some DRM-free music but obviously it just doesn't matter to Apple. Their position could be stronger if they settled for what the record companies are offering but the problem is that these companies don't want Apple to continue to have such success. That is why the labels keep changing their story. First, it was about piracy concerns. Then price tiers. Now they just want to keep Apple in check. From a business standpoint Apple really can't back down much. It just does them no good. Give the record companies an inch and they'll take a mile. Just remember Apple doesn't care where you get your music as long as you store it on a Mac and carry it on an iPod/iPhone. That's the bread and butter!
 
adbe said:
P 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.
Click to expand...
Great point.
It's amazing how few consumers know about this struggle to dethrone Apple by withholding non DRM and licensing it to Amazon, etc.
Be an informed consumer, don't buy into the old guard's tricks!!
 
I wonder how much of this can be attributed to Pepsi. They have had a sweepstakes going for about 7 months and they use the codes under the caps to determine if you've won something from amazon.com I have about 160 caps myself but don't purchase songs with em. But man they try to make you do it. Competition is good though yeah?
 
It's comical how up in arms people get defending Apple. Ridiculous claims about navigation difficulty @ Amazon music store to the record companies having it in for Steve Jobs.

NEWSFLASH: Record labels can decide to sell whatever format they want to Apple. Just like Apple can decide not license OS X to anyone else. they own the music and they prefer to sell it to Amazon.

In the end this still benefits :apple: as their primary objective is to sell iPhones and iPods.
 
I admit I use Amazon MP3 too...

The only time I ever consider buying from the iTunes Music Store is when they have the DRM-free version of a song. What happens a lot, though, is that Amazon doesn't have it, there is no DRM-free version, but there is the typical DRM-embedded version on the iTMS. Ugh.

28monkeys said:
WAL-MART will find its way back on top again ...
Click to expand...
Heh, no.
 
I didnt realize amazon had this great service. I am no longer using itunes. Thank god! I felt like I was being held hostage by some crazy communist regime!
 
jashic said:
I didnt realize amazon had this great service. I am no longer using itunes. Thank god! I felt like I was being held hostage by some crazy communist regime!
Click to expand...

Yeah, that crazy regime is called the record labels. They continue to hold their own artists, Apple, and everyone else hostage and they have been for decades now. It's certainly nothing new.
 
I _tried_ to buy a track from Amazon and it was the worst experience. Not only finding the track that I wanted was a pain in the ass (compared to iTunes). I had to download an application, that doesn't work with Firefox. (I didn't fiddle around with it much) So, fired up Safari and went through the whole process again.

Well, the CC they had on file was wrong. Rather then just re-checkout, I had to go through the entire process again.

Needless to say, I went back to iTunes and purchased the tracked I wanted in a fraction of the time.
 
gnasher729 said:
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.
Click to expand...

You're right. If you look I was responding to someone who said it should be illegal for the record companies to decide who, how, when, format, etc... someone is allowed to sell their content. I was simply pointing out that it's the same method that Apple uses to sell OSX and sue people like Pystar. I just want people to be consistent in their views. You can't root for Apple against Pystar and then root against the RIAA vs. Apple. 🙂

/dev/toaster said:
I _tried_ to buy a track from Amazon and it was the worst experience. Not only finding the track that I wanted was a pain in the ass (compared to iTunes). I had to download an application, that doesn't work with Firefox. (I didn't fiddle around with it much) So, fired up Safari and went through the whole process again.

Well, the CC they had on file was wrong. Rather then just re-checkout, I had to go through the entire process again.

Needless to say, I went back to iTunes and purchased the tracked I wanted in a fraction of the time.
Click to expand...

Hmm...buying from Amazon has always been a simple process. Their downloader works with any browser (it's just an app that sets the mime type). Does anyone use the search function? That's the first box I go to on any music service and both Amazon and ITMS work like one would expect...returning songs that you searched for. I'm confused on how ITMS is so much better than Amazon from a users standpoint. Both are equally easy to use a search box. I also find the sample clips to load much faster on Amazon than on ITMS. Finally, it's a bonus when I'm looking for a song and it's cheaper than ITMS 🙂
 
eastcoastsurfer said:
You're right. If you look I was responding to someone who said it should be illegal for the record companies to decide who, how, when, format, etc... someone is allowed to sell their content. I was simply pointing out that it's the same method that Apple uses to sell OSX and sue people like Pystar. I just want people to be consistent in their views. You can't root for Apple against Pystar and then root against the RIAA vs. Apple. 🙂
Click to expand...

That's not a good analogy, on many levels. A closer analogy would be Apple selling Apple computers through BestBuy, but not through CircuitCity.
 
seedster2 said:
It's comical how up in arms people get defending Apple. Ridiculous claims about navigation difficulty @ Amazon music store to the record companies having it in for Steve Jobs.

NEWSFLASH: Record labels can decide to sell whatever format they want to Apple. Just like Apple can decide not license OS X to anyone else. they own the music and they prefer to sell it to Amazon.
Click to expand...

It's really not just like that. An equivalent analogy would be more like if Apple let HP, Sony and other PC makers license OS X but not Dell (or whoever the market leader is at the time), and at the same time the music companies employed lots of musicians to create albums of tracks that were all released by 'Sony' or 'EMI' or whoever.

They don't have it in for Steve Jobs personally, but theydo want to lessen Apple's dominance, because it gives them more power. Understandable, but still pretty scummy towards consumers IMHO. They should let the market decide, by scrapping DRM everywhere altogether.

seedster2 said:
In the end this still benefits :apple: as their primary objective is to sell iPhones and iPods.
Click to expand...

Yes, I completely agree with that. But it's still the music companies fault that iTunes has loads of DRM tracks where Amazon does not. I'm sure it's legal and up to them, but it's a shame when Apple have got such a great user experience in their store, bar the DRM.
 
adbe said:
That's not a good analogy, on many levels. A closer analogy would be Apple selling Apple computers through BestBuy, but not through CircuitCity.
Click to expand...

And Apple is perfectly free to do that also. For a long time Apple only sold computers online or at Apple stores.

I wasn't looking for the perfect analogy though. I was just pointing out that if you want to defend someone's right to sell their IP any way they want to then you need to support it across the board.
 
Woah, now that I read this, what's with all the hatin' on the iTunes Plus music? AAC is superior to MP3 in virtually every way. MP3 can be great if it is encoded using modern technology (e.g. a modern LAME encoder -- think Max, for you Apple users) but from every technical perspective AAC is superior.

But in practice, here is how it breaks down:

Winner
iTunes Plus Music. With AAC encoding and a very respectable bitrate this is the best music you can get. Encoding is top notch and quality is stellar. You're not going to be telling it apart from the CD. The only reason why I sometimes choose Amazon over this format is that the DVD player in my car doesn't support AAC, which means I would have to re-encode this music in MP3 format if I wanted to play it on an MP3 DVD, and in that case I would be losing out.

Runner-up
Amazon's MP3s are very high quality and they sound wonderful. In practice, despite technical differences, at a bit rate of 256 you won't be noticing much difference between this music and the iTunes Plus offerings. As such, if you want MP3 rather than AAC (which there is absolutely no reason to want unless you have equipment that doesn't support AAC -- equipment going forward will support it) Amazon is the way to go. You can save $.10 on some songs as well and occasionally Amazon has some really cool deals (you'll miss them unless you pay close attention, though). The interface is much more frustrating, but for someone who can figure out how to participate in a forum, this is no great challenge. Once you download their crappy downloader it does most of the annoying work for you.

Fair
Regular ol' DRM-protected iTunes music with a bit rate of 128. Many elements of the music industry maintain that this music is virtually indistinguishable from the CD, but I disagree -- and I'm not alone. Play this next to an iTunes Plus song, or something from the Amazon MP3 store, and you'll notice the difference (well, as long as you're listening to something that actually contains music). Five computers is quite generous and if you are responsible this shouldn't be an issue, but I hate DRM and avoid this in almost every case.

But let's be clear about something... it isn't Apple's choice to decide what isn't offered in the iTunes Plus format. They want to use that format. The choice belongs to the labels which, as mentioned earlier, are very cautious when it comes to Apple and the music store. They want to create an environment with multiple players so they remain in as much control as possible. This isn't exactly a good thing for us in this case. 😉
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back