Time magazine has named Apple’s iTunes Music Store among its “50 Best Websites” in their “Lifestyle and Culture” category:
Despite several copycat efforts in recent months, this is still the best place to buy music, legally, and it’s more popular than ever, selling 2.7 million songs a week. Choose from more than 700,000 tracks or check out the new celebrity playlists (Mischa Barton is a Guns ‘N Roses fan ? Who knew?). Another new treat: music videos (a video link will appear on the artist’s main page, if there are any in the offing). Before you can visit the store, though, you’ll need the iTunes software, which is free and runs on both Macs and Windows PCs (Macs need OS X; PCs Windows 2000 or XP). Get it at apple.com/itunes/download .
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: On May 5th, Apple announced it had sold 3.3 million songs in one week. Apple has also recently opened the UK, France, and German iTunes Music Stores, selling a combined 800,000 songs in the first week. Time’s numbers are a little old, but they got the rest right.
While not technically a website, iTunes 4.6 does play my favorite music while I make the first post!
Actually – iTunes Music Store IS technically a web-site.
if its a website, how can i get to it w/o itunes?
iTunes is not a website, it’s an application. If it was then iTunes would be a browser.
Seems like there was already a discussion about this. Safari KHTML is built into iTunes. It is a specialized browser. If Apple wanted they could develop Safari for windows machines as well.
If it’s not a website, how come people are able to post links to songs? It is a site that is accessed over the web, it just requires specific software to view it.
Technically, iTMS is a website. It uses the same WebCore HTML engine that Safari uses for browsing your standard websites. That’s why Apple was easily able to integrate music videos into iTMS. iTunes (the app) is basically a specialized browser that allows you to access iTMS (the “website”), just like people use Safari, IE, or Mozilla to access CNN.com. It’s actually not really that much different than, say, Quicken for the Web which ONLY works with IE 6.
“If it’s not a website, how come people are able to post links to songs? It is a site that is accessed over the web, it just requires specific software to view it.
That’s right. It is a website. Web pages (as we know them) require specific software to view as well, they are called “browsers”. The iTMS is a site on the web, hence it is a web site. You just use a “different” piece of software.
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
2 a : the place, scene, or point of something b : one or more Internet addresses at which an individual or organization provides information to others often including links to other locations where related information may be found.
I’d say the iTMS fits into that definition.
from the horses mouth: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/
“Just to clear up a common misconception, iTunes does not use WebKit to render the music store. What you see when you visit the iTunes music store may look “web-like”, but it isn’t HTML, and it isn’t rendered by WebKit.”
–Dave Hyatt
Thanks for the post, Lord Byron! I read that article last week which is how I knew the iTMS is NOT technically a website.
:p
Last post!
iTunes is an application you idiots