I'm sure you cherry-picked the worst examples possible but yeah, some real personal hate for Steve Jobs there. Who's to judge though, maybe the Jobs-meister ran over his dog once
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The Beatles Reach 5 Million Songs, 1 Million Albums Sold on iTunes
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Or for people who stopped buying CDs years ago. I haven't set foot in a CD store in about 10 years.
If you can't tell the difference between AAC/MP3 and a CD then I envy you in a way. Every time I hear an MP3 I cry a little inside
Apple seriously needs to start selling lossless music, even if it is just as an option. Peoples' bandwidth these days is more than good enough. MP3 was fine in the dialup/Napster days but it is such an anachronism now.
If you can't tell the difference between AAC/MP3 and a CD then I envy you in a way. Every time I hear an MP3 I cry a little inside
Apple seriously needs to start selling lossless music, even if it is just as an option. Peoples' bandwidth these days is more than good enough. MP3 was fine in the dialup/Napster days but it is such an anachronism now.
Enough people have done the same thing as me to force brick and morter stores to close up over the years. I can only think of two CD shops within an hour of me not counting BestBuy or Wal-Mart.
It's not my work, I found it on Google images.
If you can't tell the difference between AAC/MP3 and a CD then I envy you in a way. Every time I hear an MP3 I cry a little inside
Apple seriously needs to start selling lossless music, even if it is just as an option. Peoples' bandwidth these days is more than good enough. MP3 was fine in the dialup/Napster days but it is such an anachronism now.
I certainly can't tell the difference, and I'm happy with that.
I do still buy CD's though. There's a lot of stuff that is still not easy to find as a download, and I'm still a sucker for the whole package. Besides, it's often cheaper to buy the CD.
I rip it straight away (to AAC) and never actually play the CD. Ease of access and portability mean that it will be a long long time before lossless files are an option.
Apple seriously needs to start offering lossless/FLAC format in their store. It's doing injustice to The Beatles by having their music in garbage MP3.
Don't know what you mean by "access". A lossless file would be handled by iTunes in exactly the same way as a lossy one, albeit with longer download/sync times & greater storage space requirements.
Regarding portability - I can store at least 12 lossless albums on my 32GB iPhone 3GS and still comfortably have enough space for all my other stuff on there. Yes, I could store 10 times (or more) that in lossy music - and if I was going to be away from my laptop for a long time I would probably do that as iTunes gives you that option. But I much prefer to have quality over quantity and 12 albums is sufficient for me on any given day. The amount of storage space available is always increasing rapidly anyhow - hard drives are dirt cheap and I fully expect the next gen iPhone to offer at least 64Gb storage.
By access I mean the ability to access the music. One of the big advantages for many people of digital libraries is that they don't have to have their physical CD's within easy reach.
I find that if I am reliant on having to get the CD's I just end up sticking to the same few. For me that is the great benefit of media players like iTunes, and the iPod. I can just decide what to play (or even just select random) and they are there. I certainly don't want to have to decide in the morning what I may fancy listening to in the afternoon.
One day I'm sure most of us will have lossless music, even on our portable devices, but at the moment it just isn't practical to have multiple external hard discs attached to our computers to store our music libraries, however cheap it is.
You can still carry a reasonable selection of lossless music on an iPhone/iPod though, although obviously a lot less than with lossy music. It just comes down to the choice of quality or quantity. I choose quality. Plus I still have much more of a selection than back it the days of tapes or CDs!
I don't know why you would think multiple external drives are required - 2TB drives are common (and cheap) and could store up to 3-4 thousand lossless albums. That is certainly much more music than I currently (or probably ever will) own.
I'm not really knocking you for choosing to listen to lossy music, it's your choice after all
I guess audiophiles will always want to moan about something, whether it's CD vs vinyl or lossy vs lossless I'm not really knocking you for choosing to listen to lossy music, it's your choice after all
I'm pretty sure that neither of us are knocking each other for our preferences. It's always interesting to see other people's requirements.
If I could hear a difference between lossless or lossy then there would be some sort of incentive to having these files, but as I can't then there is fairly pointless. I can certainly see why some people would want it though.
Regarding HDD space, I currently have an external attached to my laptop, which holds my iTunes library. It has the benefit of being powered by the computer so is at least reasonably portable. A 2TB drive (which may or may not hold it all in lossless) uses up a power slot and is not portable. That's quite a big issue, as I work from one of three locations when at home.
Fair enough point; this will probably only cease to be an issue when the average home network becomes more sophisticated and servers become commonplace.
To be honest, the issue here is really iTunes. It is quite messy the way it shares media amongst computers (home sharing is OK, but you can't sync devices locally using it etc).
What it needs is a way for multiple computers to share an iTunes library as if they were held on the local computers (rather than the unfriendly home sharing method), keeping one central set of metadata (playcounts, ratings etc), and being able to sync devices.
I'm sure it is possible, but it's quite messy. I have resorted to keeping my libraries in sync using TuneRanger, which works well but means that I have to keep a local copy of the library on my laptop.
I think we've strayed off topic.
They must be independent. The Beatles albums actually average out to more than 10 songs each and, as you point out, 1 million albums would be more than 5 million songs.
The real question is whether a box set is included as just one album. If so then that will make a big impact on the numbers. One box set is 14 albums and 256 songs. If they are just recorded as one album then that the number of reported albums won't accurately reflect what has been bought.
because old people don't know how to use PirateBay?
That, or they still have enough of a moral compass to not blatantly rip-off everyone and everything they possibly can in the digital realm.
Just sayin...
Why would you buy the White Album on itunes when you can get it in audio CD form for all most half the cost, and have a physical copy of it to boot? Give me the CD and I'll upload it to the appropriate player.
Why would you buy the White Album on itunes when you can get it in audio CD form for all most half the cost, and have a physical copy of it to boot? Give me the CD and I'll upload it to the appropriate player.
Preference. A lot of people just don't want CD's, and others don't buy enough music to make it worth shopping around much.
Many people don't want to worry about ripping CD's. They would rather just buy it in iTunes and not have to worry about it.
Exactly - think of the environment, Huntn!
That 'convenience' factor plays out to the point where folks will pay more on iTunes than Amazon so they don't have to fiddle with the 'Amazon downloader' or whatever ... personally I get more from Amazon or eMusic since both are cheaper ...
Exactly - think of the environment, Huntn!
That 'convenience' factor plays out to the point where folks will pay more on iTunes than Amazon so they don't have to fiddle with the 'Amazon downloader' or whatever ... personally I get more from Amazon or eMusic since both are cheaper ...
I would much rather buy a few songs on iTunes and be playing them in less than two minutes than spend 30 minutes driving somewhere and back to pay whatever price CDs cost these days and be stuck with a whole CD I probably won't like.
What do CDs cost these days? I remember when one disc used to cost about $15 back in the 90s.
If you got to a mall store like FYE you are looking at $15 - 20, Amazon is more in line with iTunes album pricing.
Album (sorry, CD ... I'm old
) prices kept edging up until iTunes knocked them back into line. When CD's launched we were paying ~$10 - 12 for records (I actually found a receipt stuck in a Miles Davis record I had grabbed in ~1982 for $10.99) and they cost more ... but we were assured prices would come down.Of course, as with everything else from music labels, that was a lie - prices increased slowly while costs plummeted due to economies of scale. That continued even as piracy became prevalent - labels railed about piracy but did nothing about their broken pricing models and pushed CD prices close to $20!
Sadly the requirement for an increased price ceiling in order to give iTunes DRM-free music was just the first step back in the wrong direction ... once again the power of greed to consume common sense ...
Apple has NEVER sold mp3. It's been AAC from the start. Not lossless, admittedly, but still better than mp3.
iTMS counts "a song" a single separately sold song, an album single sold album, and a multi-album package as one "album". If you buy a song (counter songs +1) and then do a "Complete my album" (counter albums +1) it reduces song sold total by the songs you had prior to "Complete my album" (counter songs -1). -- Source: iTunes staff
So the number of actual sales of Beatles is mindblowing. As for "why", only the customers that bought them know. It would seem that most (if not all) tracks (and videos?) were available on pirate sites beforehand. But - perhaps they were of lesser quality, awkwardly named, no artwork and without iTunes metadata? Nobody wants all those 96 kbit/s unnamed MP3s anyway? For a cost of couple of pizzas, you get the whole collection, the extra, high quality sound and you can burn all the CDs you like with it.
I can see the reasoning behind one's decision to purchase.
So the number of actual sales of Beatles is mindblowing. As for "why", only the customers that bought them know. It would seem that most (if not all) tracks (and videos?) were available on pirate sites beforehand. But - perhaps they were of lesser quality, awkwardly named, no artwork and without iTunes metadata? Nobody wants all those 96 kbit/s unnamed MP3s anyway? For a cost of couple of pizzas, you get the whole collection, the extra, high quality sound and you can burn all the CDs you like with it.
I can see the reasoning behind one's decision to purchase.