| Thursday, January 22, 2004 |
18:06 - The iTunes Monster Grows
|
(top)  |
And if you keep shooting it, it feeds on the rays and only gets bigger.
J Greely has been keeping a close eye on new features being added to the store, and of note lately are an RSS feed (which allows you to tune your music preferences with a bunch of checkboxes and menu options and then produces an XML/RSS feed for you to peruse in your favorite syndication receptacle), and a new "Imports" section (no URL available-- just wait until it fades in at the top of the Music Store page in iTunes). This latter features a page full of albums that are apparently exclusive to the iTMS, and which all come from exotic locales like the UK and Benelux and the UK and the UK and France and the UK. Chances are that this section will be doing a lot of expanding in days to come. (I want my Rammstein, dammit!)
Meanwhile, the grass roots continue to deepen and spread. Goombah, which is nearing final release, pairs you up with other iTunes users and matches you music collection up with theirs, producing lists of music you might like to buy. And for GarageBand (which, as Damien noted in e-mail, and which this article seems to confirm, reeeeeally prefers it if you're running a G5, wink, wink), songsmiths now have a centralized clearinghouse site to host their songs, much like iCalShare.com for iCal calendars: GBXchange, soon to be MacJukebox.net. Sure didn't take long.
This plus the Billboard charts feature added two weeks ago make it pretty clear that the iTMS has only barely begun to flesh out its offerings. Now that the first wave of competitors has hurled itself with all its force against Apple and drained back like the sea off the rocks, Apple's ready to concentrate on really inventing what this stuff's going to look like for the next five or ten years.
I, for one, can't wait.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
