“a track isnt music or art unless there is an audience present!”

you mean to tell me that my be-mulletted iron maiden coverband isn’t art!!

there will ALWAYS be copycats. they will be cast aside with time just like all those beatles imitation bands that no-one even remembers

VINYL:
-doesn’t work in the car
-hard to hand out at a show/expensive to produce.
-degrades with use and requires special care.
-the absolutely astounding and staggeringly gigantic variety of discoverible treasure at prices cheaper than conaco/AMPM hotdogs at more places than you can shake a stick at.

TAPES:
-horrible, but novel quality.
-CHEAP!!!
-a vast untapped sampleing source.
-indie rock irony bonus points.

MP3s
-can be free
-easy to swap/dupe/distribute online.
-hard to hand out at shows.
-those car stereos that can play thumb drives are the greatest inventions ever. no more spindles in the car.
-no one will find my, or anyone elses mp3s at a thiftstore years from now/no second hand sales.
-mp3s are like buttholes and myspace accounts.
everyone’s got em. you spent 200 hrs on your tracks, but you’re on the same level of “johnny the mash-up kid” who pirated an old copy of cool edit pro.
- you can’t hustle mp3s..seriously.

cds:
-easy/cheap to hand out
-cheapest physical medium to mass produce.
-gets damaged more easily than any other medium
-way harder to ignore than mp3s
-totally 10 years ago…I mean really. cds are the new tapes.(wink)

I think there’s enough room for everyone here.

So, I don’t trust the big labels in that they somehow have the consumer’s interest at heart and they want to help the consumer and break down the “big bad Apple” who is causing all this trouble! LOL…

Nope, if they ever gain any amount of control over the market, once again, they’ll simply slap on more draconian DRM and make sure that no one ever caters to the consumer — ever again. So, don’t let them do that.

Apple is the one who has the consumer’s best interest at heart, simply because they make the best products in that they try to figure out what benefits the consumer the most, while (at the same time), Apple is going to make money at doing that. Both win!

The “proof” that Apple is good at catering to the consumer is simply their overwhelming market share in this segment. It doesn’t happen that way simply from glitzy products or lots of advertising or the “cool factor” alone. It’s something that the consumer sees as a definite benefit to them, over and against the big music labels.

I hope the big labels go down the tube and the artists start going direct, through intermediaries like Apple (and bypass the labels) and get a bigger share themselves, along with Apple keeping on making better products for the consumer and the labels lamenting that they lost control of an extortion market that they used to rake in the dough with.

There will always be die hard vinyl fans, cd fans but when it comes to MP3s you can store 2000 songs in whichever favourite players of yours and let it run through the full collection of yours without having to get up from where you are sitting and change the cd or vinyl.

The same with Apple TV it is the apple of the future where you can store all your movies and watch the one that you fancy at that moment. Try front row and you will never look back but if you want to watch your movies six inches from the screen then i would strongly recommend blu-ray. (Front Row works with VLC too)

I wonder if 99¢ is not a good price then what is? or you would prefer the labels to charge at whatever they want.

Confession - I don’t buy cds because i can’t afford them nor vinyl because I can’t afford to own a Macintosh sound system.

There are at least 5 different digital tunes vendors selling my work in Japan and iTunes sells my stuff worldwide. If it wasnt for them, I wouldnt have the resources, time or knowledge to contract with mobile carriers, local ISPs or any other resselers in places I cant speak the language, etc.

Theres no threat of monopoly here, theres nothing forcing me or any other small fish to deal with Apple. I can at any time go back to selling vinyl only.

As a customer I find all kinds of neat stuff on iTunes. Just last night I got an album from a band called Yidcore that I’d never heard before but found doing a search for “If I Were A Rich Man” (Fiddler on the Roof). Been plenty of cases like that where I go looking for one thing and end up finding and buying something I had no idea existed but it turns out I like.

In short I see no threat at all to musical variety here and as a customer I find lots of benefit.

All you folks bitching about WalMart? Come live some place without big box discounters and see how much you enjoy paying Everyday High Prices for stuff you need.

My only concern is, I haven’t seen numbers lately, but if Apple continues to push 70-90% of the online download sales, that seems to me to be an unhealthy number. So by “nowhere to go but down,” I mean in share … I’d hope that other players, big and small, take a bit of that share as the overall market grows.

Ah, but that’s the beauty of the digital realm.

Large retailers must carry physical inventory. You need to have a place to put that inventory, like a warehouse. Warehouses cost money. You don’t want something that isn’t going to sell taking up valuable space sitting in a warehouse that could be used for storing something that IS selling.

So Walmart wants to only stock stuff that is going to sell–and sell fast. They don’t want to buy 50 CDs if it’s’ going to take a year to sell them all. They want to buy 5,000 CDs that will sell in one quarter.

Unlike Walmart, Apple has no physical inventory. Because their inventory is digital, they can store more of it in a given amount of space (how much can you store on a hard drive? How much space does it take up? Compare that to the amount of space taken up by the same amount of music on CDs).

So Apple can afford a much larger “inventory” of music than Walmart because it’s much cheaper to keep around and there’s less risk in music which doesn’t sell in large volumes–It costs Apple as much to keep a copy of the #1 selling song as it does to keep the #1,000,000 selling song.

So I don’t think you need to be concerned about Apple’s “variety” of music.