No email and no calendar entry on the iPod Touch, no third party apps on the iPhone, and Amazon has a better music store than iTunes. Apple's consumer electronics division has stopped listening to the consumer, and the tide will turn.
Check out this interview with Will Friedwald, owner of the world's largest iTunes collection.I just re-compiled the main library (something that takes about six hours – I only do it a few times a year!). Here are the new stats:
849 GB | 172,150 tracks | 809.2 days
2,935 artists | 11,561 albums
iTunes library database file - 282 MB
iTunes library XML file - 259 MB
For reasons I will get into later, I also have several sub-libraries; theoretically, all my music will eventually go into the main library. I also have a separate “annex” of about 200-300 GB of stuff that I am gradually adding in to the main library. If I were to put everything together, which I am slowly doing, it will be around 1200 GB.
from Jeanne Meyer, EMI's Senior VP of Corporate Communications:• EMI approached Apple about DRM free tracks, not the other way around.
• EMI is cool with any other music store doing DRM-free tracks. This is not an iTunes exclusive.
• Those stores can put songs in any format they want. The iTunes premium price and AAC 256 kbps format are Apple's Marketing decision.
• EMI made this move based on research that showed consumers want DRM-free tracks.
• They're doing this to get a bigger stake in online music, believing that even though CDs are 90% of their sales, those figures will shrink or stay flat. They're projecting that online sales should rise to to 25% of their sales by 2010.
• The DRM-free tracks should, they believe improve sales: Even as piracy gets easier, so does the ability to play songs on any MP3 player available. (That is, once some other music store releases EMI tracks on MP3.)
Apple has jettisoned some of the conventions of traditional music retailing -- notably, the practice of selling prime promotional spots to recording companies willing to pay for better visibility for their acts. But behind the scenes there's plenty of horse-trading going on that influences which songs are seen and purchased by iTunes customers.
Apple -- now one of the largest sellers of music in the U.S. -- offers home-page placement in exchange for things such as exclusive access to new songs, special discount pricing or additional material such as interviews with stars. Most other big retailers, digital and physical, also seek exclusive offerings, but Apple is especially aggressive and has outsize clout when it comes to the slightly out-of-mainstream music it often emphasizes.
