On April 1st, 1976, a crack group of nerds established Apple Computer, Inc. They kicked around for a decade or so before finally getting it together in the late 90s, turning misfortune and misadventure into oodles and oodles of cash for their smug (and now very rich) shareholders.
Previously bought only by beardy purists, Apple's products can now be found in most households and are market leaders in the world of portable media players. There are few who would question the importance of the ipod in the development of the digital music scene.
The recent launch of the ipad and new iphone (yawn) is significant, but not so much for what Apple are talking about (their marketers have divine knowingness down to an art form) but what they're not. On the 4th December, 2009, Apple bought www.lala.com, an American music streaming site similar to Spotify. If you check out lala's site, you'll see a brief message noting that the service has been discontinued as of May 31st, 2010. In their last two big press conferences (for the ipad and iphone) lala wasn't mentioned.
itunes has long been criticised for it's restrictive and overbearing nature and as Apple have moved into selling videos and other interactive content with music, the size of individual downloads has soared. Are Apple moving away from this particular model and considering alternatives? Are Apple about to launch istream?
i heard they were planning to use the intrastructure of lala to launch a cloud based i tunes service based on subscription, so it'd be like an i tunes spotify (i stream as you said), which is interesting as it has 80% of the market share already for bought downloads, so it's funny they are moving into this subscription based model (because you'd think people would start subscibing and stop downloading)... I think it's an indication of where digital is headed... it's headed for the subscription based clouds!!!! ... its interesting when you look into streaming... what industry analysts are saying is that the benefit of the subsciption is that people pay for it on a monthly basis or so, and they on average wouldn't have SPENT that much money on downloads anyway, in fact, some might not even bother listening to it, but they will always be paying! ... it's potential money for nothing... and something at the same time! interesting stuff!
Apple ... lala ... clouds. If only it was possible to combine these words into something funny.
I guess I'm really old fashioned but I still like to actually possess an album, physically or on my pc. Cloud music would be more like renting - but that does seem to be where it's all going to end up.
I think a lot of fans still like to be able to hold onto something, so since physical CD's have declined concert tickets and merch sales have all gone up! ... it's all swings and roundabouts i reckon! x
If nothing else, digital has given us the joy of hearing about bands' "physical release", which always raises a smile.
I don't think downloads will ever be able to replace the feeling of holding a much anticipated album in your hands for the first time, nor thumbing through the accompanying booklet. Vote vinyl for bigger pictures and better sound. :-)
