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

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!

Steve Jobs announced in his “trademark” way… “Oh one more thing! People thought they would never add it until hell froze over”. He said “this has happened. Yes, it’s iTunes for Windows XP and Windows 2000” :-) To say it in his words “iTunes for Windows is the best Windows app ever written, the best jukebox on Windows"…

I have tried other players on PC and none of them were as easy to use as iTunes on my Mac. And now Windows users can enjoy this great app too because it is exact the same program with the all the same features. Even the interface is Mac-like. Microsoft won’t let you burn MP3 CDs, unless you buy a Windows XP upgrade pack. But now with iTunes you can. It can even burn DVDs on Windows with extra large playlists.

Why is it taking so long? Every time I read some news from the record companies about their continuous ramblings about their sales that have been dropped again I get frustrated. As I understand it, in Europe there are SO many different labels…

This artist was 2 years ago with this label, then now he’s under this label etc. so discussions all over between labels… If they only would come to an agreement somehow it would get moving and an iTunes Music Store would be possible and they would sell. But no, they rather loose time and money on all this arguing instead of thinking ahead and seeing all the advantages of working together and setting up some nice project like iTunes Music Store for Europe. People can be short minded :-(