Apple's Music Store - The Future of Music

A few notes and corrections: While the iTunes store is currently Mac-only, Apple's intention is to expand into the Windows market by the end of the year. (Apparently, part of their thinking was to work out any glitches in a small market, which Mac is.)

Also, Apple is not selling MP3s. It uses a different codec which is generally regarded as superior. It's still compressed, but what you buy should sound a lot better than a 128kbps MP3.

Finally, while Apple may have only 3% of the personal computer market, I believe the iPod is the best-selling portable music player. I can't vouch for the company's long-term financial viability, but if all you look at is its PC market share, you're missing a lot of what Apple has going for it.

In fact Apple has made strong moves in the direction of the music market with their acquisition of Emagic and their development of 96khz/24b support in their OS. Apple has always been a favorite platform in professional audio, and the Emagic involvement is suggestive of future directions related to audio.

Regarding some of the other comments above, recall that Intel announced support not long ago for SACD and 96k/24b as part of their next generation chip standard, with some wording implying that all pc's should have high resolution capability. I wouldn't discount high resolution distribution, it is much too soon to see how things will unfold in the future, but as long as there are markets for high quality audio, there will be some means to serve that market.

The exhortation to get big quickly should apply even post dot com bust. If Apple wants to see their model grow and expand, they would do well to heed their own company story (great initial innovations, but lack of widespread licensing), or to look to players such as Adobe with regard to pdf (adobe reader is everywhere on all platforms). Even so a freely distributed device independent music player or box is no guarantee of success when OS platforms with majority share are constant moving targets as e.g. Sun has learned regarding Java (Java virtual machine: write once, debug everywhere). Given low OS market share, proprietary compression creates a quandry in which it is difficult to achieve customer lock-in while inducing mass format adoption.

Very true, Agon, but remember that Apple has two scaling problems here. Problem #1 is the Windows market. Problem #2 is getting the music industry to buy in fully and make their entire catalog available this way. I suspect part of the go-slow approach here is designed to relieve the concerns of the labels.

As for the "proprietary" codec, it belongs to Dolby, not Apple, and as far as I know there's nothing to stop Rio or Sony from producing an AAC player just like they produce MP3 players. Granted, Apple made a big mistake 18 years ago when it decided not to license the OS. They can't make that mistake this time, because they don't control the licensing--Dolby does.