Apple to offer unlimited free iTunes music to iPod/iPhone owners | Hacker News Reader

Apple to offer unlimited free iTunes music to iPod/iPhone owners

macworld.co.uk

23 pointsnaish12 comments

Am I the only person who likes ownership? I buy all my CDs and rip them to my computer. I installed Gentoo on my computers and I use programs that I have installed. I'm using GMail right now, but that's only because I haven't taken the time yet to research and set up my own (similar) local solution. Basically, I don't like to trust my goods and information to other people, and I find it strange that so many people willingly forfeit true ownership.

Owning stuff is fine (I enjoy it too). This is just another option that people haven't had before (at least not legally).

I'm with you, but I think the trend is in the other direction. As a lifelong book collector, my eyes were opened when I heard Cory Doctorow (an even more obsessive bibliophile) state that he was thinking of selling off most of his books -- the logic being that, in a world with digitized libraries, eBay, Amazon and ABE books, it's easier and cheaper for him to just obtain a used copy of anything he wants to reread and sell it on the used market after he's done.

I don't actually believe this enough, yet, to put it into practice, but it shocked me into thinking about it.

It is grossly inefficient for me to have to keep a physical copy of Star Wars around in my house just to prove that I bought the darned thing. It is grossly inefficient to have my own, personally recorded collection of every single Alton Brown Good Eats episode. These things are not rare: They are treasured by zillions of fans. They are unlikely to become rare in my lifetime. I have, or will soon get, all the bandwidth I need to download them on demand. The only reason I have to cart them from one apartment to the next is that our stupid copyright laws make it easy for their creators to jerk me around -- raising prices, charging me over and over again, editing the films to make them different from what I remember, taking the films off the market for ten years, inserting artificial roadblocks that make no sense in the high-bandwidth era (like physical DVDs from Netflix instead of digital downloads from Youtube HD) -- unless I buy a physical copy and make it my own.

I don't think that's going to last. Time is not on the side of that model. It's not as efficient and the people who still believe in it get older by the day.

"to offer" != "is reportedly considering offering"

Too good to be true?

Anyway, if this comes to pass I can imagine playlists being a hot commodity. Kind of little out-of-band time-shifted radio stations. Downloading will stop being "try before you buy" and will become, well, "just try this".

A plan like that would make me consider buying an iPod and putting up with the iTunes DRM.

I don't have any exact quotes but (correct me if I'm wrong) Steve Jobs has historically been against a service like this, and said his customers are quite happy buying music per-track.

Yet just as with the iPhone SDK, where he initially did not want third party developers writing applications on it, he listened to the demands of the market. Yeah, he's still being a little up tight about iPhone App registration...but I guess my point is the man makes an initial guess of what's best for the company, but then listens to the market in the end, as he should.

Exciting stuff though. I'm psyched.

"Steve Jobs [...] said his customers are quite happy buying music per-track. Yet just as with the iPhone SDK, where he initially did not want third party developers writing applications on it, he listened to the demands of the market."

Maybe he's just being deliberately misleading.

I guess then he'd need a motive to be misleading. Off the top of my head I could see him doing it to enforce his love for surprise in his demos...any other ideas?

I don't know how I'd feel if he was being deliberately misleading. He is still a CEO of a large publicly traded company...and should be somewhat upfront about what they're up to. I mean to hide is one thing, but to deliberately mislead?

His motivation is just being himself... you could correctly predict every single project Apple is secretly working on and he would adamantly deny every one, then confirm them all 2 days later at MacWorld. That's just how he is.

everyone keeps saying jobs/apple changed their mind about the sdk. i don't believe it. i think it's that they knew they are in entirely uncharted territory here, and they wanted to take the time to do it right. and apple typically never pre-announces anything, so it wouldn't be like them to say "we're working on an sdk, it'll be ready in a year."

they pre-announced the iphone itself, but that was due to fcc issues. if they hadn't done that, the world would have known anyway, due to the paperwork they had to file.

This is "free" as in "pay a fixed fee up front for a license that lasts until the hardware breaks".

Interesting dilemma. The labels will want to make it for some tracks only and make others be pay per track. Apple will probably want "all of the artist's tracks in iTunes". That could make an incentive for the labels to keep material out of iTunes.

Which is frankly fine with me. I mean, I use Rhapsody via a web browser on my mac to listen to music because I can just pay a fixed fee per month and listen to a lot of good music. Some tracks are not streamable, yes. In addition, Rhapsody for a while has promoted a service called "Rhapsody To Go" which lets you download music to a compatible MP3 player (no iPods) and listen to it on that as long as you maintain a subscription.

My point being this model is well hashed out. It is really only a matter of time until Apple jumps on this. In terms of the hardware pricing, they'll probably set up some kind of a subscription service pricing model (as that is the existing model) and then derive pricing on hardware based on that, if they go that route. But subscription based is the simplest to market and understand.

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