| Wednesday, January 19, 2005 |
14:32 - Building an Empire of Cool
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It can be frustrating, talking to a friend in England and trading links to good tracks we've each found in the iTunes Music Store, only to be confronted with error messages saying "The item you've requested is not currently available in the US store" (or "UK store", depending). iTunes may not bet a full "Amazon.com for music" yet, but sometimes its inventory holes are provincial in nature—reminding us all of the labyrinthine morass of legal exceptions and compromises underlying every single track in the store, individually wrangled by the labels for maximum profit and exposure and by Apple for maximum catalog content.
And yet it's getting there. This site is where UK music fans go when they hear a cool song in a TV ad (like I wish I had for tracks like this one for those Garnier Fructis shampoo ads); note that all the tracks they list feature handy purchasing links at both Amazon and iTunes.
Steve said that the iTMS has maintained an unmoving 65%-or-so hold on the digital music download market for the whole past year, even in the face of all the upstart competitors. It seems to be sinking in that Apple's not about to be driven out of this chunk of the pie anytime soon, so everybody may as well move past the "ignore them" and "ridicule them" and "fight them" phases and skip straight to the "win" phase.
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Brian Tiemann
