Quote:
Originally posted by law2day
And it looks pretty cool, too. It will be interesting to see how this music venture plays out. Will folks pay $1 a song, and for how long. Assuming the answer is yes, how long before a competitor hits the market and tries to take Apple's new market space?
I might pay a buck if the site was user friendly and fast -- while limewire works, it is slow at times and kludgy to use (not that I know from personal experience).
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I played with it very briefly last night. It strikes me as incredibly easy to use within iTunes. All you do is choose "music store", and it takes you to the front page. It has some featured selections, but you can search. Search for say, U2, and most of their recent albums come up at the top of the screen, and all of the songs on those albums, plus several EPs come up at the bottom. Click on a song. It plays for 30 seconds or so. Then there's another button to click to purchase (I didn't do that). Amazing.
I think $1 is a great for buying a la carte songs. 20 years ago when I started buying 45s, the price was $1.50 or something (and that's pre-inflation). Here, the selection is anything you want (that's in the catalog) and far cheaper. There are plenty of CDs I bought for 1 or 2 songs. Going forward, such CDs are entirely irrelevant.
I think the success depends on a couple of things. 1) Will people decide to be honest, and pay a buck for a high-quality version of a song rather than stealing through Kazaa or whatever. 2) Will Apple eventually roll out a windows version of iTunes or a comparable interface so others can use it. As to 2, there will be plenty of debate whether windows users should be give access, but if they're not, someone else will get a similar deal with the music cos. (barring an exclusivity deal, which Apple may actually have gotten for a couple of years), and push apple's service to the margins.
My cynical view would be to make a windows version of iTunes, but make the hardware requirements for effective use pretty high (let it run on slower machines, but really slowly). That way, people who already have a $2000 machine can get it's full benefit, but are already in the apple computer price range, so are viable switchers.
