MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - B2B Focus, newspapers and the state of iRex

pdam · 10-11-2006, 01:05 PM

to Jaed's point... the fact that it wasn't legal didn't stop people trading or downloading it ... legality and formality were less important to the facts of availability and ease of use; a LOT of people were using Napster et al, enough to let Rio introduce the first real portable MP3 player (way before the iPod). Also in terms of CD's - the issue here was that a standard (pretty much universal) format - MP3 was available and the means of turning CD's into MP3's was easily and freely available.

Content was readily available and/or the means of production were freely available is what drove this - not legality.

What the iPod (or rather iTunes) did was find the commercial model to persuade a lot of people to use (at least in part) a legal service (a good thing!) but in terms of a legal source being the main source of music? having just read the long tail, there is a statistic in there looking at iTunes tracks sold / iPods sold giving a figure of 25(ish) tracks per iPod ... for a 20-60GB device, other tracks must come from somewhere (CD's other file sharing services, swapping collections etc) ....

With online music the stars were aligned, with the current state of online books - I'd question if they are aligned at this point to drive such uptake ...

10-11-2006, 01:05 PM	#14
pdam Groupie Posts: 199 Karma: 100 Join Date: Aug 2006 Device: iLiad, iPaq, Psion5&7, Blackberry	to Jaed's point... the fact that it wasn't legal didn't stop people trading or downloading it ... legality and formality were less important to the facts of availability and ease of use; a LOT of people were using Napster et al, enough to let Rio introduce the first real portable MP3 player (way before the iPod). Also in terms of CD's - the issue here was that a standard (pretty much universal) format - MP3 was available and the means of turning CD's into MP3's was easily and freely available. Content was readily available and/or the means of production were freely available is what drove this - not legality. What the iPod (or rather iTunes) did was find the commercial model to persuade a lot of people to use (at least in part) a legal service (a good thing!) but in terms of a legal source being the main source of music? having just read the long tail, there is a statistic in there looking at iTunes tracks sold / iPods sold giving a figure of 25(ish) tracks per iPod ... for a 20-60GB device, other tracks must come from somewhere (CD's other file sharing services, swapping collections etc) .... With online music the stars were aligned, with the current state of online books - I'd question if they are aligned at this point to drive such uptake ... Last edited by pdam; 10-11-2006 at 01:09 PM.