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Originally Posted by kamm
Ummm since when "iTunes moment" has achieved anything especially as long as format goes?
FYI iTunes was never been anything more intended than a quasi-monopoly distrib platform for Apple, nobody else.
Also iTunes did not drop DRM until very recently and still charges extra, even if you already own the track -a typical cheap, Apple-like money-grabbing trick.
OT: I often wonder how on Earth Apple mananged to brainwash so many people to think they have invented so many thing when, in fact, they did not jack&^%$... it's beyond me.
The most revolutionary change in format came with mp3, this German Fraunhofer Institute-developed format.
Easy-to-download/share music, for free, arrived with Napster.
Mobile music (aka MP3) players arrived after Diamond Multimedia successfully defeated the (il)legal attack of the RIAA-mob in 1999, clearing the path for the flood of mobile music players (ironically Diamond's winning argument used the precedent of Sony Corp of America vs Universal Studios 1984 - Sony, the RIAA member...  )
Anyway, my point is that iTunes or Apple had nothing to do with formats (other than screwing up everything by introducing its own crap) and even less with dropping DRM (plenty of other stores offered DRM-free music for years now, sometimes even for free.)  |
Ah, yes.
Everyone knows that Apple supports DRM, and only dropped it due to competition from online music stores that were DRM free.
Clearly Apple was desperate to hold on to the DRM to protect their "monopoly" at the iTunes store.
As usual, what "everyone knows" just ain't so.
And even a modest investigation into the history of Apple, iTunes and DRM will make that completely clear.
Apple wanted to open the iTunes store DRM-free. But the big studios wouldn't go for it. So the DRM-imposed restrictions that the iTunes store began with were
the least restrictive terms that the studios would accept! If you poke around you can find lots of contemporaneous articles and interviews that mention this. You'll find interviews with both Jobs and studio heads saying so flat out. (Statements like "Only Steve Jobs had the clout with the studios to get a deal this good for consumers" stick in my mind from that era.)
Towards the end of the DRM-only period, you can find Steve Job's open letter on the subject of DRM. Read it -- you'll find you agree with most of what he has to say. The only problem was that only one of the 3 big studios was willing to let Apple sell DRM-free -- and even they insisted on a higher price in exchange.
More recently, we've had a number of years during which the big studios have let other stores sell DRM-free... while continuing to contractually require DRM at the iTunes store. This was a deliberate attempt to promote other online stores at the expense of the iTunes store. The studios were attempting to put a dent in Apple's dominance in that market. They failed (mostly).
So, when you wrote
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Also iTunes did not drop DRM until very recently and still charges extra, even if you already own the track -a typical cheap, Apple-like money-grabbing trick.
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you've missed the mark.
Apple pushed for getting rid of DRM from the very beginning of the iTunes store. Further, the charge for upgrading your existing library is not Apple-motivated -- it's another thing that the
studios insisted on. You've missed the mark completely.
Please understand -- I'm not claiming that Apple's longstanding opposition to DRM is rooted in "good-guy-ness." Rather, they've opposed DRM because they believe that problems caused by DRM and associated restrictions
get in the way of making money. They've opposed DRM because it's bad business. And that's a position you can trust: after all, Apple is in business to make money, so opposing bad business practices that get in the way of making money is entirely consistent with their purpose.
As for inventing things, they
mostly don't claim to have done so. But your "introducing their own crap" line w.r.t. music is also off the mark. AAC is not "their own crap" -- it's an ISO-standard encoding. It's part of the MP4 standard suite. The only "their own crap" involved is the DRM -- and that was forced on them by the studios. Oh yeah -- the Apple Lossless format is theirs too. It exists because license terms for MLP (what you find on DVD-Audio and some Blu-Ray discs) were too expensive. But note that the various lossless encodings are more-or-less interchangeable in terms of degree of compression. And, of course, any compression that is truly lossless provides exactly the same results when doing a round trip through compression/decompression.
I realize that "big bad Apple" is an article of faith in certain online communities. But in this case the "history" your post assumes is just plain incorrect.
Xenophon