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Comment by sandipc | Hacker News Reader

today's a day I won't forget? The day Apple announced yet another way to buy songs from the world's most popular band?

It's a reference to Beatles's[del][del][del] Paul McCartney's song "Another Day". And this is kind of a big deal as Beatles was one of the last really big top-tier bands that blocked every attempt to distribute their records online. They still cannot be streamed on Spotify but it's just a question of time now.

I feel that many people here don't really appreciate the importance of this. This is really the beginning of the end of the old ways of the music recording industry, and a new music recording industry is emerging right now. Very interesting times indeed for those of us who are working in this field or anyone who loves music.

And yes, it was Apple, not any of the major record labels or consumer electronics companies that has brought us this change.

I think this is more like the end of the end... The traditional model is dead for many years already.

CD sales still account for a greater proportion of sales than downloads (though likely to change shortly).

I think the end of the end is still some time away. Vinyl has supposedly been dead for some time but they still seem to sell a fair amount of it.

Vinyl's experienced a recent surge due to a retro trend. It might last, or the hipsters might get bored and move on to something else, like quasi-ironic adoption of 8-tracks or cassettes.

There was an increase in vinyl sales in the last couple of years but overall it got to a certain level about a decade back and then plateaued (somewhere around a 5% market share in the UK at least). There is a fashion thing in there but that steady level over a decade suggests something more.

Maybe that's specific to vinyl and other physical media won't see a similar effect but we'll have to see.

Certainly at the prices we see right now CDs are often comparable (sometimes lower) than download prices. All things being equal personally I'll still take the physical item, if only it's because it's a free backup, and I think there are others like me.

I was amazed to see someone say yesterday that 3/4ths of music is still sold on CDs. I can't remember the last time I even considered buying a CD.

Easy to play CDs in the car.

Over two years ago I bought an Alpine head unit for my car that doesn't even take CDs. It has an iPod jack, a USB jack, and an 1/8" audio jack. The day before I installed that was the last day I even considered buying or burning audio CDs.

After building iTunes libraries on multiple computers in a single household, multiple iPhones, iPods, and now an Android phone, I can say that I honestly miss having music on a CD that I could rip/play anywhere and I felt like I really owned it. The old book of CD's actually feels psychologically easier to manage than 4 different iTunes + Amazon mp3 libraries.

The beginning of the end started a while ago. The internet, particularly broadband and mobile connectivity, have revolutionized a variety of industries. News, mail, music, movie rentals.

It seems to me that the Beatles finally caved to reality. Sure, there are "adults" that still buy physical media, but the "kids" haven't been doing that in a high enough volume to sustain the such a distribution model for a few years now.

Oh come on.

Of course, it's not a Beatles song. It's a McCartney solo song.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Day_%28Paul_McCartney_s...

Good point. I stand corrected.

No worries, it's just amusing because McCartney has all his solo stuff on all the services. So you could already get "Another Day" on Amazon MP3 yesterday:

http://www.amazon.com/Another-Day/dp/B003D5FGBW

AC/DC still aren't on the store, and they're still a somewhat active band. And by now, they may be even more relevant than the Beatles, if such a thing is possible.

iTunes is the top music retailer in the world, even before this. This isn't the beginning of the end of the old ways; it's the Beatles catching up with 2003.

They certainly got a lot of free publicity. This story is on the frontpage of all the Canadian and US newspaper sites I read.

Is Apple starting to 'cry wolf' a bit too much lately? :)

Funnily enough, I already forgot what day it was.

Has Apple ever made a major announcement via website update? I mean, it seemed kind of silly to expect major changes from this...

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