“A San Francisco start-up released an early test version of its open-source Songbird music software Wednesday, with which its ultimately hopes to undermine the dominance of Apple Computer’s iTunes,” John Borland reports for CNET News. “The company, which is led by digital music veteran Rob Lord, has cautioned the open-source community not to expect a full-featured music player from this first release, which they are calling only a ‘proof of concept’ for now.”
“Indeed, the first version has a tendency to crash occasionally, and lacks some of the more advanced features of an iTunes or Windows Media Player. But it does show off the company’s vision of a music player that is focused on the Internet, rather than on a computer’s hard drive,” Borland reports. “The player could also be used to tap into online music services such as RealNetworks Rhapsody or Yahoo’s music subscription service.”
Full article here.
The convenience of having a single program that provides access to all of the online music services that nobody uses cannot be adequately understated.
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>Looks like the .doc, .xls, .wmv, .indd, .psd, .qxd, etc. formats are doing quite well. Closed ecosystems.
Just to humour you for a minute. The analogy is rather silly. All of these formats are easily read by 3rd party applications. They may be proprietary, but they’re not closed. Have a play with Openoffice or the GIMP, and you’ll have no problems. The difference with DRM is that the access is based on encryption, so you really are in a closed ecosystem. You’re even limited in the number of copies you can make (even Microsoft allow you to distribute your Office documents widely). Completely different problem. Your point was?
>HelloooOOOOooo its called multi-plugin dumbface, go google it and >download it, then skin your goddamned itunes.
Thanks so much, Alice for pointing that out.
Apparently my sarcasm didn’t come through in my post, but your rudeness came through loud and clear…or is the program called “multi-plugin dumbface”?
Yes…you can “skin your goddamned itunes”…but you can’t “feather” them like this program can. I was merely making a sarcastic comment, and then you had to go jump on me in a public forum. Just proof that people need to think before they hit “submit”.
And guess what…not everyone has knowledge about every single prrogram available out there.
Reality Check – that’s great that we only pay less than a quarter per song but how is that working for the artists? Like it or not, most of us are hard working capitalists and we don’t work for free. At least at iTunes (or any of the other mainstream online stores) I can sell my songs via CDBaby and stand to get almost all of the .99 per song. Why in the hell do you think that I would allow someone to sell my music at a quarter of it’s value when that’s my living? Would an artist in his right mind allow his or her hard sales (CDs) to be sold at 2.50 – especially if I’m signed and party to a recording contract? .99 not an iTunes-exclusive price – it’s pretty much the market standard for digital music. Please note that Apple is fighting hard to keep it at .99 – not a penny higher.
Also you need to understand that you aren’t limited to playing your iTMS songs on iPods – go ahead and play them on your computer or burn them to CD and play them anywhere you like. Rip them again and play them on your WalMart MP3 player if you like.
theloniusMac: “Chevrolet of Gardening” That’s funny.
Yes, it’s for driving your hoe around.
This was featured on Slashdot a few days ago, and was met with near universal disdain. The consensus was that it’s a crappy iTunes ripoff which only hooks into stores that people aren’t even marginally interested in. (Also, it’s Windows-only, which shuts out a huge chunk of the early-adopter market.)
Sure, Songbird sounds good on paper. “Choice! Competition!” In practice, however, the multi-store thing has been tried and rejected, in multiple markets. Online consumers tend to gravitate to one store they like and trust and give them all their business. When they do shop around, it’s to find the lowest price. But it’s extremely unlikely there will ever be a price war in music.
People use iTunes. People like iTunes. iTunes look-alikes will never gain any traction. Apple’s “competition” needs to stop wasting resources trying to copy Apple and instead try to leapfrog them to the next great thing. But knowing Apple, they’ll probably get to that thing first as well.
Adam –
1) I’ve yet to find a poor pop star or music executive, so I’m afraid that doesn’t wash
2) Lower prices would mean more sales. Distribution costs are the same. I doubt the artist would notice any loss.
3) Several tens of thousand CD’s are available at emusic, quite legally, so obviously at least some of the music industry agrees with me. They could, after all, have gone with ITMS.
4) Ripping AAC to CD then to MP3 results in serious loss of quality. Go read about how audio compression works. This is not a solution – particularly at 99 cents a track
5) “Apple is fighting hard to keep it at .99” – how sweetly naiive you are. I hear they’re also planning to return all profits to .Mac subscribers next month – we get about $10k each.
>(Also, it’s Windows-only, which shuts out a huge chunk of the early-adopter market
Wrong – Linux and MacOS are being released soon
Oh and comparing the office docs to song sold online is truly Apples and Orangutans. Two totally different bundles of matter altogether. We create office docs for distribution. The ability to share them outside of MS applications is damned-near essential in this wired world. The ability to take someone’s music – which is an item of monetary value and a salable product – and distribute it freely among the daisies is criminal. DRM is in place because it was made painfully obvious that given the option, most of us are naturally gonna steal something that we would typically have to pay for. Now, Apple’s implementation of DRM in that it forces you to use iPods if you want to easily listen to your music on a portable player is certainly not neccessary to curb piracy but that’s the way they’re doing it and it’s their perogative. They believe in selling you the whole widget – iTunes + iPod and they believe that by keeping this system closed we benefit with a seamless experience. You buy an iPod and buy songs from iTunes and the world is cozy and warm – it all works great. Apple sells more iPods and they’re happy too and it’s certainly their right. The sweet smell of capitalism.
MDN takes are so funny and this site rules
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and boo to the iTunes clone
Reality Check –
They’re are plenty of us poor independent artist types that would love to be making a living in music that take great issue with your apparent arrogance. Those 10 thousand or so artist featured at eMusic are probably also selling their wares at the other channels too and are probably just happy to have their music out there. Good for them. They’re more than likely NOT industry folks, mind you. Many many other artists – several million more in fact – strive to be as successful as possible and must enlist the big ugly music industry to try and make that happen. Do I wish it were different and we all could be massively successful as ma and pop indie artists? Certainly but then I’d also have to devote my time to mass marketing, distribution, legal issues, scheduling and promotion, etc. and really I just want to focus on the music. The machine takes care of all of that for me and they’re paid quite well to do that.
So if iTunes sold their songs for .22 a piece you think the artists wouldn’t notice the difference? First of all, understand that digital sales of music hardly account for much of the bottom line in an artist’s bank statement. But just for the sake of argument lets imagine that digital sales were the end-all be-all and .22 is the market standard. Say I’m really really lucky and I’ve negotiated a deal that gives me P of that (never in a million years). So I’m now making .11 of each song sold…which is probably about what an artist makes off of each song sold right now after the machine takes it’s cut. If I have a hit single that sells really well…say 100,000 in 3 months or so, I’m gonna pocket a whopping $11,000. Now remember, they don’t have to buy my whole album now, they can just buy this single so my album sales wouldn’t even come close to those numbers. It’s gonna take a hit album the likes of Thriller to make me any signifigant change and this is all assuming a P cut, which just isn’t reality.
“1) I’ve yet to find a poor pop star or music executive, so I’m afraid that doesn’t wash”
You haven’t met many pop musicians, have you? Even the ones at the top of their game sometimes have very little. When TLC was at the height of their popularity, they each netted $30,000 for an entire year. Why? Because there were about 100 people ahead of them, each taking sizable cuts of their sizable income. And that says nothing about all the musicians who have record contracts (and therefore a huge amount of debt), but aren’t stars. 95% of contracted artists wind up in debt to the record companies.
Well, RC’s got me convinced! I’m done with the iron hand of ITMS… maybe I just feel like making 40 copies of an album for my own personal use! Convenience and reliability are over-rated. It’s off to eMusic…
Okay, they don’t have that… maybe they’ve got… s*#t… okay how about this other band… uh…
Okay, back to iTunes. Well, at least I fought the man.
Beautiful take!
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It really reminds me of iTunes with the appearance of the “Adjust” panel in iPhoto. Maybe Apple could take a hint and make that a new optional appearance theme for upcoming releases of iTunes. Great compliment for the black video and nano iPods!
hehe love the take mdn!