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The iTunes Store (known as the iTunes Music Store before September 12, 2006) is an online music service run by Apple Computer through its iTunes application. Opened on April 28, 2003, the Store proved the viability of online music sales. As of September 2006, the Store had sold over 1.5 billion songs, more than 80% of worldwide online digital music sales. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by FairPlay, Apple's version of digital rights management.
Pricing (Unless otherwise noted, all prices in this article are in US$. Dollar amounts provided for the Canadian and Australian stores are in local currency.) All songs are sold for a single price in all countries but Japan: e.g., 99¢ in the U.S. and Canada, $1.69 in Australia, €0.99 in the eurozone or £0.79 in the UK. In Japan, songs sell for ¥150 or ¥200. Most albums cost $9.99 in the U.S. Volume discounts of up to 20% are available for purchases of more than 25,000 songs (10,000 for educational institutions.1) TV shows are available for $1.99 per episode, as are music videos and short films. Newly-released feature-length movies are sold for $12.99 during the first week and $14.99 afterwards; older movies cost $9.99. There is also a weekly promotion where one to three songs are available each week as a free download. Songs are added each Friday and are available until the following Friday. Some artists also choose to have select songs available for no charge. For example, the indie band Bright Eyes offers their single "When the President Talks to God" free of charge. Availability To buy files through iTS, a user must have a pre-paid card, e.g. an iTunes gift card, or use a credit card with a billing address in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Republic of Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, or the United States. Other people can download podcasts and previews only. Customer support Apple provides no customer support for the iTunes Store over the phone. All customer service inquiries are handled online.• Background Debuting on April 28, 2003, the iTunes Music Store was the first online music store to gain widespread media attention. Apple's store allows the user to purchase songs and transfer them easily to the iPod through iTunes. The iPod remains one of the few digital music players (besides some Motorola cell phones) that are intended to work with the iTunes Music Store, although some other digital music players will work with iTunes. The iTunes Music Store launched initially with around 200,000 files available for download. The store began after Apple signed deals with the five major record labels at the time, EMI, Universal, Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment and BMG (the latter two would later merge to form Sony BMG). Music by more than 600 independent label artists was added later, the first being Moby on July 29, 2003. The total offering includes more than 3,500,000 songs*, including exclusive tracks from more than 20 artists, including Bob Dylan, U2, Eminem, Brie Larson, Sheryl Crow and Sting. Each song can be downloaded for 99 U.S. cents. Free 30-second previews are available of every song. Most albums are priced at 9.99 U.S. dollars, although some longer-than-average albums cost more, and others less. The user can transfer downloaded songs to an unlimited number of iPods, and burn compact discs from playlists up to seven times. Catalog content New songs are added to the iTunes catalog everyday, while the iTunes Store is updated each Tuesday. Apple also releases a 'Single of the Week' and usually a 'Discovery Download,' on Tuesdays, which are available for free for one week. As of 2005, Apple Computer places future release albums on pre-order status. This is the first time an album of its kind integrates bonus songs and music videos not found in the physical version. The additional songs are only available to those who pre-order the album, and after its release, the songs are removed. These types of albums include a digital booklet. This was the first indication that iTunes would gain video playback in the near future with the inclusion of videos in pre-order albums. The first such album was X&Y by Coldplay. The iTunes Store also includes over 9,000 audio books, encoded at 32 kbit/s. 90 second previews are offered for every book. These books are provided by Audible.com. This is the same format available if you signed up directly with Audible.com and chose the "iPod" format, the main difference being that it is not necessary to sign up for a subscription to get audiobooks as is the case with Audible. A small discount is still provided by getting the Audiobooks through the iTS, but on a selective basis by Apple in comparison to an "always on member discount" if one has an Audible subscription. The iTunes Store lacks music from some popular artists, such as AC/DC, The Beatles, Garth Brooks, Kid Rock, Led Zeppelin, Tool, and Jethro Tull. The Beatles' record company Apple Records is currently in a legal battle with Apple Computer over the name "Apple." (On May 8, 2006, a ruling was declared in favor of Apple Computer, but Apple Records has said they will appeal the ruling. Despite this, plans have been announced by Neil Aspinall to completely remaster and release the entire Beatles catalogue on unspecified online music services, as well as to release some previously unheard work by the band. No firm date has been set for this as yet. See also: Apple Corps v. Apple Computer.) Garth Brooks currently has a contract that distribute his music exclusively through Wal-Mart, making him the first major artist to have such a deal. There are, however, biographies within the Music Store for both The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. The iTunes catalog does contain certain exceptions including a Tony Sheridan collaboration album with The Beatles ); Kid Rock's first album, Grits Sandwiches For Breakfast; and two Radiohead songs. iTunes added the whole Metallica catalog (minus Metallica's S&M collaborative album with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, which was added to the store later) on July 25, 2006, ending what was arguably the most significant holdout to iTunes' track-based sales model. On August 29, 2006, the entire catalog of Linkin Park, including their collaborative work, was finally added. Also on September 5, 2006, Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band added their classic hit album, Night Moves and on September 12, 2006, Bob Seger will be releasing his new album, Face The Promise. As of August 2005, the Japanese store offers no songs from Sony Music Entertainment. However, some musicians like Motoharu Sano are trying to sign with Apple independently. On September 6, 2005, Sony announced that it plans to sell songs through the iTS but did not give a specific date.• Similarly, the Australian store didn't offer any songs from Sony BMG until January 17, 2006, when Sony and Apple finally reached an agreement. In 2004, CDBaby (an online music store which features more than 100,000 independent artists) signed a deal with Apple and managed to get every artist who sells albums there (of those who wanted digital music distribution) on iTunes. In November 1, 2006, Apple created a new category for Latin content, "iTunes Latino". Telemundo and Mun2 made some of their popular programs available for purchase, becoming the first Hispanic television content in the store. It offers muisc, music videos, audiobooks, podcasts and television shows in Spanish in a single concentrated area. The brief descriptions given to the content is in Spanish as well as several sub-categories. Downloaded songs come with the song information (name, artist, album) already filled out, though iTunes provides a service to do this for songs not purchased from the store. They also come with album artwork. As of the release of iTunes 7, the artwork can be obtained for songs not purchased from the store for free if the user has an iTunes Store account. Purchased songs do not come with lyrics already typed in to the application's window for them; nor does iTunes provide a service for acquiring the missing lyrics. However, they can easily be obtained using a third-party website or Dashboard Widget. Video In October 2005, Apple announced the latest iPod would be capable of playing video files, which would be sold online through the iTunes Store in the U.S.. These videos included 2000 music videos and episodes of popular television programs. Apple made a deal with Disney to be the first supplier of TV shows, the first shows available included all the episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives with each episode becoming available the day following its original airing on broadcast TV. Several short animated films by Pixar are also available. The selling of videos on iTunes sparked considerable debate as to whether there was a paying audience for programming available for free on TV. As MP3 Newswire pointed out, users are not so much paying for the TV programs themselves. Instead they are really paying for a service that offers the convenience of someone else digitizing free broadcast episodes for them for their portable device, each episode in commercial-free form, and a convenient place to select and download individual shows. Through an updated version of QuickTime Pro, users can create their own videos for the iPod, including digitized versions of programs recorded on their VCR if they wish to take the time and effort and save the cost. On September 12 2006, Apple began selling feature-length movies through the store and removed the word "music" from the store's name. The service debuted with a catalog of 75 films from four Disney-owned studios: Disney, Pixar, Miramax and Touchstone Pictures. The service is currently U.S. only, with Apple planning to internationalize the service in 2007. On the same date, Apple increased the resolution of videos and movies sold on the iTunes Store from 320x240 (QVGA) to 640x480 (VGA). iPod games On September 12, 2006, the iTunes Store began to offer additional games for purchase with the launch of iTunes 7, compatible with the 5th generation iPod with iPod software 1.2 or later. Currently, these include: Bejeweled, Cubis, Mini Golf, Mahjong, Pac-Man, Tetris, Texas Hold 'Em, Vortex, and Zuma. Market share and milestones Internationalization Originally only Mac OS X users who had credit cards with a U.S. billing address could buy songs with the service, but Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, announced plans to support both Windows and non-American users. The Windows version of iTunes and support for the Windows platform from the iTunes Music Store were announced on October 16, 2003, with immediate availability. Beginning in 2004, the service has become available in a number of countries outside the U.S.: File format
Digital rights management Apple's FairPlay Digital rights management (DRM) is integrated into iTunes, which manages songs purchased from iTunes Store. Users are not allowed unlimited CD burns of playlists, or to play the songs on more than five computers within 24 hours. However, they are allowed to copy the songs to an unlimited number of iPods. With the introduction of iTunes 4.5, Apple raised the number of machines allowed to use purchased music from 3 to 5. They also cut the number of times a user can burn CDs of the same playlist from 10 to 7. This adjustment was the result of the renegotiation Apple had with major labels. Apple's DRM technology is far from unbreakable. SharpMusique has been written to bypass it and allow the files to be used without technological restriction.• More simply, a user can convert protected files to unprotected MP3 format by burning them to an audio CD, then ripping them back to iTunes. (Some audio quality is lost in this transcoding from one lossy format to another.) A quicker, though equally lossy way of transcoding the files is to record the "Wave Out Mix" using an audio recording program (such as Audacity) while playing the song on iTunes - and then encoding it to a format of the user's choice. Competitors accuse Apple of using iPod, the iTunes Store, and "FairPlay" (Apple's DRM-protected implementation of the AAC open standard) to establish a vertical monopoly to lock iPod users into using the iTunes Store exclusively (and vice versa). This "lock" has two aspects: In July 2004, RealNetworks debuted an application named Harmony, which converted files purchased from RealNetworks' RealRhapsody service into a FairPlay-compatible format that an iPod could play. In response, Apple accused RealNetworks of "adopting the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod."• and released a firmware upgrade that rendered fourth-generation iPods and iPod mini incapable of playing such files. RealNetworks has vowed to develop another workaround. On January 3 2005, an iTunes online music store customer sued Apple, alleging the company broke U.S. antitrust laws by freezing out competitors.• In 2006, a controversy erupted about a French draft law aimed at reinforcing the protection of works of art against "piracy", or illegal copying; some clauses of the law could possibly be used to request Apple to provide information about its FairPlay system to manufacturers of competitor players. Apple and associated lobbying groups protested the draft law, going as far as to suggest that it condoned "state-sponsored piracy". Some U.S. commentators claimed that the law was a protectionistic measure against the iPod. Promotions On Super Bowl Sunday, February 1, 2004, Apple launched a promotion with Pepsi in which they gave away 100 million songs, through tokens on selected soft drink bottle caps. Unfortunately for Apple, Pepsi failed to properly distribute the bottles to major metropolitan areas until only weeks before the promotion ended, despite a one-month extension of the deadline by Apple. The promotion, however, was repeated beginning January 31, 2005, with 200 million songs available, and an iPod mini given away every hour. On July 1, 2004, Apple announced that, starting with the sale of the 95 millionth song, an iPod would be given away to the buyer of each 100 thousandth song, for a total of 50 iPods. The buyer of the 100 millionth song would receive a PowerBook, iPod, and $10,000 gift certificate to the iTunes Music Store. Ten days later, on July 11, Apple announced that 100 million songs had been sold through the iTunes Music Store. The 100 millionth song was titled "Somersault (Dangermouse Remix)" by Zero 7, purchased by Kevin Britten of Hays, Kansas. He then received a phone call from Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who offered his congratulations, as well as a 40GB 3rd Generation iPod laser-engraved with a message of thanks. Inspired by Pepsi's marketing success with iTunes giveaways, Coca-Cola partnered with 7-Eleven to give away a free iTunes song with every 32 oz. Slurpee frozen beverage until July 31, 2005. Songs could be redeemed until August 31, 2005 by entering a code printed on the Slurpee cup into the iTunes Music Store application. Coca-Cola did this in spite of having its own music store, myCokeMusic.com, that competes with the iTunes Music Store in Europe. On July 5 2005 Apple announced that they were counting down to half a billion songs. The buyer of every 100 thousandth song up to 500 million would receive an iPod mini and a 50-song gift card. The grand prize for the person who downloads the 500 millionth song was 10 iPods of their choice, a 10,000-song gift card, 10 50-song gift cards and 4 tickets to the Coldplay world tour. Twelve days later, on July 17, Apple announced that 500 million songs had been sold through the iTunes Music Store. The 500 millionth song, purchased by Amy Greer of Lafayette, Indiana, was "Mississippi Girl" by Faith Hill. On July 28 2005, Apple and Gap announced a promotion to award iTunes music downloads to Gap customers who tried on a pair of Gap jeans.• From August 8 to August 31 2005, each customer who tried on any pair of Gap jeans could receive a free download of their favorite song from the iTunes Music Store. On February 7, 2006, Apple announced that they were counting down to the billionth song download and began a promotion similar to the previous 500 million countdown. Whoever downloaded the billionth song would receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 60GB iPods, and a $10,000 iTunes Music Card. The billionth song was purchased on February 22, 2006 by Alex Ostrovsky of West Bloomfield, Michigan. The purchased song was "Speed of Sound" as part of Coldplay's X&Y album. On July 25, 2006, Facebook and iTunes began offering a promotion where members of the Apple Students group would receive a free 25 song sampler each week until September 30 in various music genres. The idea behind the promotion was to get students more familiar and enthusiastic with each service as autumn classes approach •. However in order to prevent abuse of the promotion, the weekly code that Facebook provides stops working after it has been redeemed one million times. The promotion has caused some discontent among international students, as the code is only valid in the U.S. music store. Other platforms Although iTunes is only supported on Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and devices, users of other platforms have been able to buy music from the iTunes Store by a variety of methods. iTunes is known to run passably well• using the Wine (software) compatibility layer, but this method only works with x86 PCs. This has spurred the development of alternative programs to access the iTunes Store, notably PyMusique and its successor SharpMusique. Apple has not been particularly welcoming of such developments, in March 2005 forcing users to upgrade their versions of iTunes in order to shut out an early version of PyMusique from the system• but the latest version of SharpMusique still works as of August 2006 Criticism The iTunes Store has been criticized by groups such as Downhill Battle, who claim that the service, while claiming to provide a superior and legal alternative to piracy by offering per-song downloads, does nothing to correct problems with the music industry's business model. Their protest website iTunes iSbogus criticizes Apple's misuse of the opportunity presented by an internet marketplace - calling iTunes a "facelift for a corrupt industry".• The pricing structure for videos available on the iTunes Store has also been the subject of criticism from some users. For example, an hour-long episode of a TV series, like 24, is priced at US$1.99 per episode, while music videos, typically around 3 to 4 minutes in length, cost the same amount. On June 6 2006 The Consumer Ombudsmen in Norway, Sweden and Denmark launched a common open letter to Apple regarding the EULA of iTunes through the Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman Bjørn Erik Thon. The iTunes case is based upon an official complaint filed by The Consumer Council of Norway on the 25. of January 2006. The main allegations were that: Apple responded July 31, 2006. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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