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Ha! I can't help but laugh at that!... Somehow, Apple offers up this great thing yet I feel like they are insulting our intelligence by doing it... it drives me even farther away from Apple products (if that's possible). It's the same feeling I get when I walk into an Apple store and, while messing with their gadgets, feel self consious as if I'm an adult in the toy section.

Right, and MS wasn't lying about the reasons for removing WGA from IE7 (i.e, it wasn't a market share move)

Let me get this straight.  iTunes the first and ONLY successful legal online music store.  The first legal online music store to offer music from a major label in a DRM free format.  Yet because it follows Amazon in dropping its price it is somehow now a follower?  No it is a competitor.

Apple is merely competing in the market place.  

The better question is, Why is Apple even able to lower the price on DRM free content?  If I understand the market for digital downloads correctly Apple and all other online music stores operate on razor thin margins.  Thus, in order for Apple to lower prices, EMI had to lower the wholesale price to Apple because to be frank there just isn't enough margin in Apples price to lower the price to 99 cents without suffering a loss.

Perhaps the big story is the music industry is finally coming to their senses and realizing that the best way to compete with free is to offer a better mor consistent product at price consumers are actually willing to pay.

Regards

Joe Dokes

Like I said before, competition is good.  Choice, however, is not.  When choice becomes irrelevent, the consumer benefits ten-fold by not having any confusion, and the market remains as competitive as ever as more and more manufacturers try to reinvent the wheel.  "Same ol', same ol'" breeds market penetration.  Innovation can't keep profits rolling in without competition.  If you really think this is naive thinking, the proof is in the pudding, and that pudding is sitting on a shelf in a Walmart store (but not for long - they just rolled back the prices again!)

Right now, the choice between DRM-free music is this:

A)  what codec do they use?

B)  does it have tracking watermarks?

Since Apple uses AAC, the resulting answer of question A is a no-go for most Windows and non-Apple platforms.  Many non-DRM stores are using 256Kbps audio files regardless of the codec, so quality usually isn't in question.

Question B is not something that consumers should even have to deal with, for reasons that only Google and the Chinese government would deny.

With MP3 as the defacto standard codec that all devices support, as Paul pointed out in his previous article, the answer is clear:  the only acceptable online music store will be the Zune [2.0] music store, since it offers favourable answers to both questions.

Pingback from  Music » re: Apple lowers price of DRM-free songs

Waethorn,

Please don't continue to spread Paul's Fud about AAC.  For the umpteenth time AAC is .mp4, and is an industry standard just like .mp3 and was created by the same body that created .mp3.  Many Many devices support .mp4 including the Zune and most Sony players as well as many of the new players from Sandisk.

The reality is .mp4 will be as ubiquitous a standard as .mp3 in a year while .wma will continue to occupy a sliver of the market.

As far as water marking.  Apple does incode the buyers account number in each song downloaded.  They do not incode any information like credit card numbers that could be used for identity theft.  Further, the information can be easily stripped from each song if your the tin-foil hat type of person.  Since the data is plainly available, and is easily stripped it doesn't meet the definition of a "digital watermakr."  Finally, The only reason to be concerned is if you routinely post songs on peer networks.

Regards

Joe Dokes

"For the umpteenth time AAC is .mp4"

um....no

.mp4 is the extension for MPEG-4 video streams, all of which so far have become proprietary by Quicktime, DivX, and the like.  Other than the fact that AAC is used with MPEG-4 as a next-gen audio codec, it is not wholly exclusive to MPEG-4.  In fact, AAC is also specified in one of the MPEG-2 standards.  What you imply is that every .mp4 file is strictly an MPEG-4 AAC audio file, which is completely incorrect.  Independent AAC streams usually have a .aac extension too.

"Many Many devices support .mp4 including the Zune and most Sony players as well as many of the new players from Sandisk."

....and several don't, while others also play OGG and WAV.  The point is, Apple is the only online music store to embrace AAC.  My point is valid - it's an "Apple-owned" format for now.

"The reality is .mp4 will be as ubiquitous a standard as .mp3 in a year while .wma will continue to occupy a sliver of the market."

....and 2007 was the year of Linux.  Sorry, but that's just too funny.

"Apple does incode the buyers account number in each song downloaded....The only reason to be concerned is if you routinely post songs on peer networks."

I know of many more people that would do this than would know (or even KNOW HOW) to strip out the account information before sharing them on a P2P network.