g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, January 27, 2004
18:24 - And the race is on!
http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=30179

(top) link
Who can catch Apple now? Apparently only Napster is left standing after all the other pretenders to the digital-downloads throne, and it's given Apple the ol' gauntlet-across-the-face, as Kris (who forwarded this to me) puts it.

After Apple's applications and internet service vice-president Eddy Cue made an upbeat pitch about sales on his company's $0,99-per-track iTunesstore, online competitor Napster warned music delegates to "stay-off the Apple platform".

These fighting words were issued by Chris Gorog, chairperson and chief executive of Roxio, owner of the relaunched Napster paying online music service.

Gorog tried to convince music execs they should make their record catalogues available on Napster with claims that its Windows-based PC platform is compatible with two-thirds of all the mobile music devices currently available.

I love that name, don't you? Gorog angry! Gorog say you no use Apple! You obey Gorog, or Gorog tear puny customer's head from puny customer's body! Aaaauuurrgh!

But whether Napster is being secretly headed by Howard Dean, this is a pretty silly piece of FUD. "Oh, gee, iTunes music doesn't play on 2/3 of the players out there." Hmm, that doesn't seem to have slowed down all those people for whom it doesn't matter, as they all just want iPods anyway. At the convention this weekend, out of over 2,000 attendees, I counted (just casually walking through the corridors) no fewer than thirty iPods being listened to, tacked to shirts or hanging off belts or even slithering up under big bulky costumes to have the earbuds sticking in prosthetic ears. Get with it, Napster-- the people have made their decision, and nobody's clamoring for something better.

Napster's Gorog claimed that its $9,95 monthly subscription service for unlimited downloads will become the favourite payment method, while Apple's customers are using their credit cards to pay for each 99c track oniTunes.

Credit-card payments for such small amounts could be a problem in Europe -- especially with coveted teen music consumers.

Interesting. I guess all those music stores that operated on a monthly flat fee (Rhapsody, anyone?) were such a huge success, Napster has decided that it's bound to leave iTunes floundering.

Durrr.

Okay, well, maybe Europe really is that different a place:

Old-fashioned red tape is delaying the eagerly awaited European launches for iTunes and Napster, the two popular online music stores said on Saturday.

A maze of licensing contracts, music release dates that differ by country and incompatible billing systems have combined to sidetrack the services, which many recording executives still hope will make their European debut in the first half of 2004.

"We will be here this year. I'm not going to announce the date at this time, but we are working very hard," said Eddy Cue, vice president of applications and Internet services for Apple Computer (AAPL).

Cue, one of the principal architects of Apple's iTunes, told a gathering of music and technology executives the layers of bureacracy in the European music industry were limiting the number of songs it could offer consumers here.

Like government, like industry, eh, Europe?

And as J Greely points out:

The best part, though, is the admission by the Napster spokesman that they expect $20 to $40 million in sales worldwide in a year, which is quietly compared to the over 30 million songs sold in the US through iTMS in 8 months. :-)


Napster's big trump card, the only thing it has that the other stores didn't, is its name. A name that's synonymous with illegal music sharing. A name that legal music downloaders remember as the thing they spurned, and a name that illegal file-swappers remember as the thing they never had to pay for. So why should they now? I'll be interested if they have any cred at all, and if they turn out to be capable of winning over any customers on name alone.

At any rate, this bit (from the first article) was interesting:

The other good news for the music business is that people buying online are not just snapping up current top hits, but are paying for a huge variety of tracks. A staggering 95% of iTunes's online music catalogue of 500 000 tracks have sold at least once.

Now, I remember that at the MacWorld keynote, Steve noted that some insane person had spent $29,500 on music from the iTMS since its opening. One person! (No, he said, it wasn't Bill Gates. Aww.) So maybe that's who's responsible for buying one copy of every single track in the store, even the really crappy stuff that they know nobody wants. (Him and all his rich buddies, anyway.) 95% is pretty amazing indeed.

Just think about the implications...


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