Veerle's blog

“for finally finding a middle ground between the foot-dragging record labels and the free-for-all digital pirates… Apple’s iTunes Music Store is Time’s Coolest Invention of 2003.“

Steve Jobs’ new Music Store showed foot-dragging record labels and freeloading music pirates that there is a third way. It’s not obvious to get such an award from Time Magazine, but I guess it was earned because of its disarmingly simple concept: sell songs in digital format for less than a buck and let buyers play them whenever and wherever they like, as long as it’s on an Apple iPod.

How did Jobs do this trick? In a word: simplicity, the transparent ease of use that is the hallmark of Apple’s entire product line, including the Music Store. “I’m a complete computer dummy,“ Sarah McLachlan told Time after the iTunes event last month at the San Francisco Moscone Center. “If I can use this, anyone can.“ So this says it all.

Read more on Time magazine’s website

iTunes sells 1.5 million songs during past week; five times Napster’s first week downloads. Apple is in top spot with over 80 percent market share ... Mental note! Never believe any analyst ;-) This news makes me happy since I just knew iTunes would be way more popular then Napster. In previous posts I mentioned that the popularity of the name Napster wouldn’t give any guarantee for success, like this analyst of U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray predicted.

Music fans in the US are buying almost twice as many singles in digital form over the internet as they are on CDs from stores, according to a report. My hope is that the records bosses of Europe are hearing their wake-up call, but when you will read the article you will notice that EMI Music executive Phil Quartararo said he was happy with the trend but was not yet attributing too much significance to it. What will it take to get these people off their high horse to start them realizing that this is the future!