Free ("The iTunes Store is a failure.")
lefsetz.com
lefsetz.com
Wrong. As if I owned something isn't good enough for many people. It's the same problem as streaming. If I stop paying you a monthly fee I don't own them anymore.
Spotify does allow you to buy DRM free downloads. But there's not a huge difference in price between that and any other service as far as I'm aware. Spotify hasn't really changed the long term situation. Music is still seen as more financially valuable by sellers than by buyers. While the difference in price between legal and free (illegitimately) is still perceived as too high, "piracy" will continue.
(And yes, the quote marks there are a mark of disdain for that term. If I were to call parking infringements "illegal land invasions" I'd be a laughing stock. If you can't make your case with emotive terminology, improve your case)
I own a Zune, and I like it.
Egads, I know, right!? The thing is: for $15/mo I can legally download almost as much as I want to multiple Zunes (one for myself, one for my wife) and we get $10/mo in credits to buy songs we are otherwise renting. Sure, everything is still locked down with draconian DRM (which is rather easily circumvented) but for my use cases of just being able to pop a few songs over onto one of our portables, or play songs from multiple computers (up to 5), or stream songs from my XBox - well, I just don't care about the DRM that much.
My wife & I both have iPhones and would gladly switch back to iTunes, if only Apple would offer a subscription service (cold day in hell and all that, I know).
There are subscription people and there are download people (and there are no doubt people who are both for different kinds of music). There is more than enough space for both models of listening to music. Just cause’ many people like subscriptions doesn’t mean that buying and downloading music and in particular iTunes are dead.
I’m not saying that buying and downloading music is the only true way, everyone who does anything else is a heretic and all subscriptions platforms are doomed.
It's called beets and the idea is this: just throw new albums at it; they get tagged correctly (from MusicBrainz), copied into a directory structure you specify, and catalogged in an sqlite database. Let me know what you think: http://beets.radbox.org/
Alternatively, I can just turn on Pandora and it plays music I like. It's literally a one click solution.
It makes better playlists than I could if I spent 2 hours a day perfecting my own. It also goes out and finds new music that I haven't even heard yet, but because Pandora knows more about the music I like than I do, there's a pretty damn good chance it will be right.
In the time since I've started using Pandora I've discovered more new music that I like than I ever did when I was buying individual albums or songs off of iTunes or whatever. Not only that, but I actually buy more CDs because I've heard all the songs on Pandora and I can buy the CDs with confidence, rather than wonder whether I'm going to waste another $15 on crappy music. Although, I was mostly buying CDs to play in my car, but soon I'll be getting a Droid, and then I can just play Pandora directly in my car so CDs might get obsoleted.
We're still improving it, so if you have any feedback, shoot me an email.
Then I got a new laptop and installed Linux on it - now all that music I brought on iTunes is locked and I can't use it.
So take that "ownership" with a big helping of NaCL.
FAAD2 is an open source MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 AAC decoder, it is licensed under the GPLv2 license.
It's been much longer than a few months since iTunes sold DRM music.
Because you don't want to deal with ads. You want to listen to music away from your computer. You don't want to use up your Internet cap re-streaming the same content over and over again. Maybe you occasionally have some times in your life where you don't have Internet access 24x7. Maybe you want higher quality audio. Maybe you like albums and don't want to live in a single shuffle world. Maybe you have exotic tastes in music and these services don't offer you the content you like.
Also, there is a difference between on-demand playing a song that I have never heard of within 5 seconds and typical listening patterns (at least for me - YMMV).
And I'd probably open Spotify for a song.
Nope, because her demographic is not tech savvy enough to append Youtube to their search.
On the other hand if you do the same for Arcade Fire Wake Up ... google does suggest Arcade Fire Wake Up Youtube.
Thus YouTube is slowly becoming the go-to platform(as tech savvy/early adopters per google suggests are using youtube as such). Personally this is how i listen to songs I want to hear on my PC or on my iPhone. The Youtube iphone app is cool as it saves all songs(videos) you listened to under "history"
Considering how many iPods the iTunes Music Store helped sell, I'm not sure it can be referred to as a failure. Perhaps it's a failure for the major music companies in terms of the revenue it drives for THEM (and I assume this is what Lefsetz is saying), but that wasn't the reason for creating the ITMS any more than the reason Apple launched the App Store was to drive revenue for App Developers.
I prefer to buy a CD from Amazon and rip it (at 256 kb) unless the MP3 is significantly cheaper. It then it in iTunes (on my MacBook Pro) and then onto my iPod Classic (160 GB is nice).
I sometimes but rarely buy from the iTunes store. I do subscribe to more podcasts than I can keep up with, but WTH.
I ask because people don't seem to have a problem borrowing books from a public library but never buying them after reading. So why is music different?
The upsides: fast, and free - and I don't mind the occasional "radio ad" being played. The downsides: not everything I like can be found there as the assortment is heavily geared towards contemporary popular mainstream music, and there is no guarantee that something you find will stay - it has happened plenty of times that a single track has been pulled from an album on Spotify, as well as an entire album being pulled from a represented artist's selection.
I consider the product genial, but as long as the assortment isn't complete (nor guaranteed), I will keep downloading (as well as buying).