i-rant

Amazon MP3 vs. Apple iTunes: Where Should You Shop? – GigaOM Om Malik writes on GigaOM that “More than 1 million of the 2 million songs are priced at 89 cents. The top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, unless marked otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. OK.” There are a lot of good comments (and some silly ones) here as well. My POV is that this is a good thing for people who want to save some money. The integrated iTunes application is good for me, a Mac user and the store built in is also good as it tracks the things I have purchased, but Amazon is the king of online retailers and will bring a lot to the table including buying history, integrating other’s reviews, better search engines, etc.

The fact is, Apple will win either way as long as it keeps making the best digital music players out there. Its always been about selling more iPod’s and we all know that the downloading world was crap before iTunes. Good points made in the comments about the continuing battle with the music studios. Anyone that wants to start slinging business ethics charges at Apple and Microsoft should really consider the real history of the music business – nothing ethical there. I expect that Universal and others will do whatever they can to create a model where they can raise prices or at least control things. Retailers like Amazon and Wallmart will be easier to manipulate.

I’m somewhat of an audiophile and feel there should be higher quality options when purchasing songs. After all, if I’m buying this thing for the music I want the best version of it. The record album and CD business were going this way before this all changed the game. Buying high-fidelity versions of vinyl records and SACD’s were on my list – I always had a “stylus” and CD player capable of playing them.  The standard Apple files are incomparable. I can only agree with one commenter “Universal can pull all its music from Amazon in six months, as well as the DRM free music. It didn’t give the DMR Free music to Apple for a reason. If you recall, it was Apple that called for DRM free music, while Universal called the idea preposterous. Amazon didn’t say anything.” I do think this is a true example of who the unethical one is. Unless Amazon is using this as a loss leader to get you to the store; again – there are a lot of Retail Business practices that Apple has yet to get to.  And again, the iTunes store was never designed to be a huge revenue generator, it was designed to sell iPods.

Last comment on Proprietary.  Apple has always been proprietary in regards to its OS only working on Apple machines.  Same with iPods.  And the extension of making it hard to upgrade batteries and such on an iPod jive with Macintosh components.  Most Apple machines are difficult to upgrade – its gotten easier in recent years, but only as integration standards improve.  When USB, ATA and PCI became true standards that would plug and play for real then they came into play on Macintosh  platforms.  Apple controls things to make sure the user experience is  consistent and a true pleasure.  Its what we expect from them. Its what the iTunes store was all about.  And we all “pay more” for this. Sacrificing “open” for this is a good thing; its a far cry from the opposite which is exercising market dominance by offering cheep prices/free goods for Monopolistic dominance. That’s why Wallmart dominates the small towns now, that’s why there is only MS Word and not Wordstar, Wordperfect, etc.

but then again, is iLife and iWork a move to do the same thing?