You may be a small town girl, living in a lonely world, and I may just be a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit suburban Boston, but we apparently have at least one thing in common: We don’t stop believin’.
And, according to SoundScan, we’re not alone. The classic ’80s power ballad by Journey (iTunes link) is the most downloaded catalog track—that is, songs that were released in the pre-digital download era—in history. Since iTunes opened on April 28, 2003 (which, as you avid MacUser readers know, also happens to be my birthday), the track has has gone double platinum, hitting 2 million downloads. Not bad for a 27 year old song.
Much of the song’s recent popularity has been attributed to its use in the final scene of The Sopranos—SoundScan says downloads rocketed 482% in the days around the episodes broadcast. Indeed, I fired up the song on my own iPod as I put this piece together, and I have to admit I found myself tearing up a bit. I mean, streetlights? People? Living just to find emotion? The movie never ends, it just goes on and on.
Wow. Those are words I never thought I’d write. Even now, I wonder if perhaps I’m in some other bizarro dimension. But, according to the Wall Street Journal, Dell has postponed their plans to launch a digital music player, a project they’d planned to launch before the holiday.
We got wind of the project back in July, which counted among its advisors a certain favorite “analyst” of ours. The product was based on a platform called Zing that Dell had acquired a while back, run by a former Apple exec, Tim Bucher. It would have probably involved a subscription service and also a standard that would let you listen to music from a number of different service—a standard perplexingly not named MP3.
Look, I don’t think Michael Dell has ever quite gotten what they’d need to be doing to compete with Apple. Dell (both the company and its CEO) is about business, not about design, no matter how much they try. Case in point:
But since returning as the Round Rock, Texas, company’s CEO last year, Mr. Dell has emphasized design. In a conference call last fall, he said Dell would increase consumer sales by engendering “product lust.” Dell said it would “focus on ‘killer’ products, next-generation materials,” and a “shorter development cycle” to get products out “40% to 50% faster.”
I think the reason Apple’s designs are so effective is that they don’t attempt to “engender” product lust—they attempt to make something that looks good to them. And I think that’s why Dell will fail if they try to be Apple—the same way Apple would fail if they tried to be Microsoft.
Western Digital is best known for their hard drive offerings, most notably their successful MyBook series of drives (which I, for one, am a big fan of). But it would seem that WD has realized that lots of people are storing gigs and gigs of media on their drives without an easy way to go from storing said media on an external drive to watching that movie on a big screen TV. Enter the WD TV HD Media Player, whose sole goal is to make that happen.
As Macworld's own Jonathan Seff reports in his First Look, the WD TV is a bridge between your USB hard drive and your TV. Plunk the WD TV near your TV, hook it up using either HDMI or composite interfaces, plug in your USB hard drive (I'm sure the folks at Western Digital would prefer you use one of their drives, but the WD TV supports other USB mass storage devices including cameras and camcorders), and enjoy your media on the big screen.
The WD TV supports HD playback up to 1080p in a host of different video formats (MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)), and it also supports a number of popular audio formats (MP3, WMA, OGG (for you hippies), WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA). Of course, the WD TV won't playback any media that has DRM on it (including videos and some music from the iTunes store), so if you're looking for an iTunes Store-friendly set top box the Apple TV is still the way to go.
The WD TV does have some neat tricks to offer. You can attach two USB drives at one time and the WD TV will index the content on both drives and display the media in one collection. You can also run slideshows of your photos right off of your camera.
All of this for $130, so what's the catch? The biggest drawback that I can see, other than that Fisher-Price-looking remote, is that there is no way to manage your media on the device itself. In order to add new movies/music you need to grab your hard drive and hook it up to a computer. Seems like a hassle to me, but if you store your media library on an external USB drive the WD TV looks like a winner.
DMCA. Four letters. Ten years. Countless frustrated consumers. Passed ten years ago today, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been arguably, for better or worse, one of the most influential pieces of U.S. legislation in recent years.
While the DMCA has been the legal muscle behind shutdowns of P2P services like the original Napster and Kazaa and helped usher in the era of DRM, it also allowed digital media to flourish in certain legal forms, including, amongst many others, the iPod and iTunes. So, whether you love it or hate it, the DMCA has become eternally tied to the spread of digital and online media.
Let's take a trip down memory lane to see just how this whole thing got started.
Continue reading "The DMCA: 10 years of the good, bad, and ugly"
Oh my god, the horror. Just in time for Halloween, a slasher rampage has hit the virtual corridors of retail giant Wal-Mart, as they’ve cut prices on MP3 downloads. The company recently backpedaled on their decision to turn off their DRM server, which would have rendered useless music bought by many of their customers in the past.
Of course, Wal-Mart’s been trying to get into the MP3 game for a while now, without much traction. I’d guess that has to do with the fact that Wal-Mart’s clout is mainly focused around their brick-and-mortar stores, while the music download market is associated more with companies that are identified with technology or the Internet, like Apple and Amazon. I mean, when you think Wal-Mart, does that conjure images of music downloads or low low prices on cleaning detergent?
Regardless, Wal-Mart’s out to shake up that image by lowering prices on their MP3 offerings. Now you can pick from a catalog of over 3 million DRM-free tracks from the major labels starting at 74 cents per track. Plus, if you actually buy a physical CD in their store beginning in mid-November, you’ll get a free MP3 download (not sure if that’s of the album you buy or just a random track/album?).
And in case you remember our experiences with the chain’s dearly departed video download store, you’ll be glad to know that the MP3 store is not only compatible with both Mac and Windows, but it even works with other browsers like Firefox and Safari. So, does that sweeten the deal for you, readers? What with the recent proliferation in DRM-free music stores, I’m in the market for a good search engine that’ll scan them all and tell me the best deal.
No, it’s not the mythical Yellow Submarine edition that we once longed for; no, The Beatles still aren’t on the iTunes Store; and no, Apple’s not involved with it in anyway. Now with that out of the way, here’s what does exist.
Bloomingdales is selling a special Limited Edition Ultimate Colector’s Box Beatles iPod Set. Included in the package, of which there are just 2500, are all 13 original Beatles albums on CD, plus the Love album, two masters, an engraved guitar pick, and a 120GB black iPod classic with a Beatles logo on the front and Abbey Road (the album cover, we presume?) on the back. Plus, you still have to rip all of the CDs into iTunes. And what might you expect to pay for this magical mystery box? $795.
Maybe you don’t care too much for money, but consider this: you can get an 120GB iPod classic for $249, and CDs run, what, about $15 on average? That’s another $240. And you can pick up a guitar pick for about $2. So, you’re paying an extra $250 for a swank carrying case and some stickers on your iPod. Just think for yourself, okay?
[via Engadget]
As a card carrying member of the geek clan, I feel that whenever the spheres of Weird Al and Apple intersect it is my job—nay, duty—to report on it. Weird Al, for the uninitiated, is a popular song parodist (though some of my favorite Weird Al songs are ‘genre parodies,’ in which he sings an original song in the style of a band) who lampoons pop culture every few years with a new CD (his biggest hit was White & Nerdy).
Weird Al started in the business of show when pop culture was much more centralized than it is now. Songs made the Billboard charts and tended to stay there for a long time. People would instantly recognize those songs, and parodies based on them, because they were playing everywhere. Everywhere. Now we have iPods, iTunes, satellite radio, and lots of other devices that allow us only to listen to the things we want to hear. This makes it tough for Weird Al because by the time his CD is in the stores, the songs he lovingly mocks have faded from our short term pop culture memory.
Does Weird Al let this get him down? No! He uses the very technology that created the problem to solve it. Starting tomorrow, October 7th, Weird Al will be releasing his new songs as they are finished on, what else, the iTunes store. They’ll be available exclusively from iTunes for two weeks before they make their way to the other digital music distributors on the Internet.
Disaster averted! Yesterday’s ruling of the Copyright Royalty Board, which threatened to make Apple take its tunes and go home, did not result in a hike to the royalty rate.
The proposal before the board would have raised the royalty rate on online music purchases to 15 cents per track from the current 9 cents. The board’s ruling instead left the rate as it is, though they did implement a 24 cent rate per sale of ringtone. So, if you want to support artists…buy ringtones?
Strangely enough, everybody seemed happy by the move. Apple’s Tom Neumayr said Apple was pleased with the decision; and the Digital Media Association trade group that includes Apple, Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers was likewise happy. Heck, even the representative for the National Music Publishers Association, which proposed the increase was happy that rates weren’t decreased:
“These events will bring clarity and order to an environment that for the past decade has been hampered by litigation and uncertainty,” said David Israelite, president of the publishers’ association, in a statement.
Great. Well, that’s settled then. Everybody wins!
