The best Apple rumor to pop up in a long time: Apple online music service (also here: reg. required). According to the stories:
The new service, developed by Apple Computer, offers Macintosh users many of the same capabilities that are already available from services previously endorsed by the labels. But the Apple offering won over music executives because it makes buying and downloading music as simple and nontechnical as buying a book from Amazon.com, one source said.
The songs are expected to cost $1 each and to be encoded in Advanced Audio Codec (AAC, part of the MPEG4 compression dealy). This is definitely the first service that I will consider subscribing to. Forget the fact that it is Apple-branded. What's more important is that it will likely be designed well, very usable, have lots of bandwidth and be integrated with iTunes.
There has been a lot of discussion about the topic at Slashdot, with some good points raised. The best:
- It could be the death of the album, liner notes and song experimentation
- People will pay for a quality service when there are free options.
- $10-15 for an album witout CD, liner notes or case is more $$ than at yr local indie music store.
This all very exciting, but I'm even more excited about support for AAC in iTunes. Since I am ripping my music library (1k albums) onto my computer, it would be nice to have a high quality, high compression alternative to mp3. I guess I'll be holding off on more copying until iTunes 4 is released.