Facing the Music (Store)

I'm glad I waiting a while to start in on the Apple Music service because I was blinded at first. But now the shine has started to wear off at the edges and I'm starting to see the whole board, so to speak.

First impressions are important, and my first peek still gives me a very positive outlook on the whole service. The interface is right in iTunes and it doesn't take more than 10 milliseconds to figure out how it works. The more you play with it the more you see features you can exploit as a "power user," as with the new search feature in iTunes 4 and or course keyboard navigation. Then you buy some tracks and then you start to see that it's not gold after all, it's only gold-plated.

First there is the format, AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), which Apple has sold on the promise of better quality to the consumer. What they don't mention in the regular sized type is that AAC is also great for DRM, even though we know that all DRM models are doomed to fail. So you have an audio file that you paid for that you can play in three places: iTunes, your iPod, or on a burned audio CD. Could you burn an audio CD and then rip that to mp3? Yes, but then you are back to degrading quality and we've just been sold on better quality audio. Why would we want to downgrade now? Just keeping honest folks honest, right? Bleah.

Now the catalog. I know that you can't make everybody happy, but even with 200,000 tracks there are huge holes in the inventory. One Moby album, and the "best of" at that. I'm hoping that 200,000 is, literally, just the starting point and they are being busy little bees and encoding everything they can get their hands on. Knowing what I do about copyright, licensing, royalties, and the music industry, which isn't really all that much, I still wouldn't want to be in charge of trying to get the rights to everything. It's not like they can just put up the entire history of music and figure out who gets what later, but I really wish it was like that. cough Kazaa cough I will still maintain my eMusic account to keep up on all the non-major label stuff that they carry.

The price is a bit high. I know that it's the same price as one-off tracks and albums used to be at eMusic, but I have the unlimitted subscription there, so over a month or two the tracks average out to a lot less than that. I also know that it's cheaper than the crap digital tracks at Amazon. Who wants to pay $9 for the "Broken" EP from Nine Inch Nails though? I bought it new on CD for $8.

A friend said that as with all things Apple, consider this version 1.0 and see where it goes from there. Another friend said that this is amazing considering that Apple had to work with likes of the "Big Five" and that it's the lesser evil. I guess the other evils are downloading music for free and getting ripped off by buying it new on CD.

And with all that, I've already had to stop myself from buying lots of tracks. I'm on a budget as Kat and I are house hunting. But that's another entry altogether and I still haven't written all the good stuff about Australia. Oh, and I've been gone from work for a month, they might have a few things for me to do.