“While Apple has its committed loyalists on the hardware side, it seems to have painted itself into a corner on the content side — and that means music,” Francine Brevetti writes for Inside Bay Area. “The question is, will music lovers get over its limitations in the long-term?”

“The Apple music store iTunes is available to anyone, even those with a PC. Those with an iPod device can use only the music in the format deliverd by iTunes,” Brevetti writes. “Admittedly, iTunes is a big house with hundreds of thousands of entries and it has sold hundreds of millions of songs online at 99 cents a pop. However, those who buy music from PC-based music stores can use more than iTunes; they can buy from a variety of different platforms and retailers supported by Windows media. For instance liquid.com, Napster, Wal-Mart, MusicMatch and so many others, many of which are selling their songs for less than 99 cents.”

MacDailyNews Note: Select songs are sold by others for less than 99-cents per track, that is. Many others sell other songs for more than 99-cents. Apple’s iTunes Music Store offers over a million songs, for clarity’s sake.

“‘The iPod Shuffle will give iTunes access to more customers and competition. Selling more players will open more people to iTunes, but it will also make people aware that they are limited to iTunes,’ said Lisa Malley, senior brand manager for portable media devices with Creative Labs,” Brevetti writes. “‘If the dominant platform is Windows, then Windows media will proliferate faster,’ said Mark Farish, Samsung’s director of marketing of digital audio systems. ‘The reason Macintosh failed in the PC market was because it didn’t license its technologies to other manufacturers, which Microsoft did. Now iTunes is doing the same. Microsoft powers maybe 10 different music content providers and multiple portable audio providers compatible with them. Consumers need choice. Apple dominates now, but in the bigger picture it won’t stay that way for long.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s iTunes works on both Mac and Windows and the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) offers over a million tracks for 99-cents per track. We fail to see what’s so limiting about those facts. The key is the iPod. Most people have iPods, so they can use iTunes and buy from iTMS on either Windows or Mac. Those complaining are the makers of portable players that they don’t sell like the iPod and online music stores that can’t sell to iPod owners. Well, too bad. Make a better mousetrap and see if you can sell it to the masses. Until then, we guess complaining and whining and plain old FUD will continue to be the order of the day from the also-rans.

The Macintosh platform required and still requires huge investments by developers to create compatible software. So, when faced with budgetary contraints, they chose and still sometimes choose to go with the most popular platforms. The iPod simply plays music that can be encoded, for very little cost, in any format the “developers” (musicians and labels) desire: AAC with Apple’s FairPlay, MP3, WMA, etc. The music doesn’t need to be rewritten, recorded, and remastered. It’s like writing Photoshop once and then pressing a button to translate it for use on Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. To draw an analogy between Mac OS licensing and the iPod/iTunes symbiotic relationship simply highlights Samsung’s director of marketing’s ignorance of the vast differences between the two business situations.

Related MacDailyNews articles:
The iPod is not the Mac, so stop trying to compare them – August 13, 2004