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iTunes Music Store Turns 20 Today: 'Just 99 Cents Per Song'
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I’ve got tickets to both Depeche and The Cure! So excited! I should’ve gone to see New Order when they were touring with Pet Shop Boys.
The ONLY Apple subscription I have is for iCloud as it is an easy way for me to have a mail account for my personal domain.
I do not rent software, books, music, etc etc etc.
My music comes from CDs, many bought used for $0.99 for the whole CD, many I have been given free.
Mostly 1960s-1980s music
I do not rent software, books, music, etc etc etc.
My music comes from CDs, many bought used for $0.99 for the whole CD, many I have been given free.
Mostly 1960s-1980s music
I spend more than what a subscription costs, but I don't really care. It's hard to fight that with people who want to spend the same money on phone upgrades, the better sounding AirPods, and the latest iPad Pro for the better screen.
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Buying songs is much better than a subscription. How many good new songs come out every month? For me it is hard to find even one good new song per week. Those are the only ones I would buy. There are hardly any artists that have ten or more really good songs in their whole career. Some famous artists only have five or less songs worth buying. So buying one or two songs per week is much cheaper than a subscription and those songs will be yours forever.
My main problem with buying digital good though is that it usually hard or impossible to transfer them to another person. If your grandpa dies, you can inherit his record collection which may be worth thousands of dollars, but you usually can't inherit any digital goods. You could burn those digital goods on a CD, DVD or Blu-ray, but technically those would have to be destroyed if the owner dies. Not sure how Apple handles that. At Amazon it is a huge problem. Digital books sometimes cost the same as paper books, but you can't give them to anyone else or inherit them.
My main problem with buying digital good though is that it usually hard or impossible to transfer them to another person. If your grandpa dies, you can inherit his record collection which may be worth thousands of dollars, but you usually can't inherit any digital goods. You could burn those digital goods on a CD, DVD or Blu-ray, but technically those would have to be destroyed if the owner dies. Not sure how Apple handles that. At Amazon it is a huge problem. Digital books sometimes cost the same as paper books, but you can't give them to anyone else or inherit them.
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The iTunes and iPod halo effect. It's totally what got me started on using a Mac as my daily driver.
although many people were using digital music (MP3) years before iTunes and iPods..what a revolution in the music world. happy 20th birthday!
almost old enough to…yanno
something doesn’t have to come first in order to be revolutionary. (that’s the whole M.O. of the company this forum is about!)
piracy was at an all-time high when iTunes came about, and they mitigated that an incredible amount. Apple has since been beat out in the music-listening world by Spotify (which is a shame, given Apple pays some of the best royalties in the business), but the groundwork they laid in the post-Napster era was essential for digital music becoming what it is today.
I miss iTunes. It was a lot more convenient to have the App Store, Podcasts, Radio, and Video all in one place.
I was so upset when they went to $1.69 for “popular” music lol. It’s also funny because at the time my goal was to grow my music library as large as possible, so I’d buy music I didn’t even 100% love if it was on sale. Then when streaming started surfacing my mindset was “there’s no way in hell I’m RENTING music because as soon as you cancel you lose everything.” Nowadays I ONLY stream and then purchase vinyls for albums where I like the majority of the songs so I don’t have to worry about skips lol. And seeing how my music tastes change over the years I’m really glad I stopped purchasing individual songs. Last month I finally broke away from Spotify due to lack of HomePod support and no lossless (plus I like the sing feature)… and I have a LOT of work ahead of me cleaning my library. I wish I could just “reset” Apple Music for my local stuff because 60% of it I don’t want anymore. Now I’m going to have to go line by line and decide what I want and what I don’t. On Spotify I had “self curated” and only added songs I liked, not whole albums. So I could effectively shuffle all songs and be mostly satisfied. Nowhere near there with Apple Music.
i will pay you to listen to the following albums (not really but you can find them all on YT from their official channel)
Teen Dream - Wikipedia
Depression Cherry - Wikipedia
7 (Beach House album) - Wikipedia
Once Twice Melody - Wikipedia
iTunes 2 - second logo, blue one is my favourite. It was also my first time using iTunes. The green one lasted sooooo long, iTunes 4 forever, that I was glad to see iTunes 7 with a new logo. Wasn't a fan of iTunes 10's new logo or forward.
Just one of the times that Apple saved the world.
In the times leading up to iTMS, there were serious discussions about whether media was dead in a digital world and grandmothers were getting sued for millions by the Recording Ass. of America because their grandkids installed Napster on their computer. It was just constant escalation because the only way to discourage people from downloading was to publicly destroy the lives of the few people caught.
Then Jobs got on stage and gave a fun and legal way to transact conveniently and it felt like the crisis abated almost immediately.
I still buy music too. If I really like something, I want to own a lossless version with no DRM. I buy a lot from Bleep, BoomKat, and Bandcamp. I also like to support artists. They make next to nothing on streaming. That said, I love the fact that I can try before I buy with Apple Music (or any other streaming service).
Partly true, but that was the moment when the web, as a parallel world, died. I miss being able to find music and movies with a simple click, a query on a search engine. Not for the media itself but for what it represented.
When Napster (and other phenomena that came from below) died, the commercial internet was born, the internet of corporations, which is then today's internet.