“There’s talk coming from various sections of the music business that Apple iTunes Store will soon offer high-resolution tracks for sale, and that the introduction might coincide with the future release of three Led Zeppelin masters,” Bobby Owsinski writes for Forbes. “The unconfirmed details have the hi-res tracks in their full 24 bit glory encoded using Apple’s lossless audio coding, and priced a dollar more than the current lossy AAC tracks.”
“Supposedly, the hi-res track launch is in response to the fact that Apple is seriously concerned about how quickly download sales are diminishing, with Nielsen Soundscan’s Q1 report finding that downloads have diminished 13.3% over the same time last year,” Owsinski writes. “Apple missed the boat when it launched iTunes Radio, thinking that it was a way to increase download sales instead of realizing that people stream because they don’t want to purchase their music anymore. Now it’s faced with sales falling far faster than anyone ever anticipated as streaming gradually takes over the music delivery space.”
“Apple’s only chance is to introduce a true interactive streaming service, a Spotify-killer so to speak, in order to keep it’s total music market share from drastically falling,” Owsinski writes. “Just launching a me-too service won’t cut it for Apple though. It has to be something exceptional in order to make people switch from their current streaming service of choice. Let’s face it, Apple’s track record hasn’t been so good lately in that regard, but don’t count the company out yet.”
Read more in the full article here.