Currently I live between Canada and Australia or Toronto and Brisbane to be exact. I spent four months in the Toronto winter over December -March. During this time I had my first taste of Apple iTunes but unfortunately as I do not have a Canadian credit card as yet I couldn’t actually make a purchase.
For the one, maybe two people that aren’t familiar with iTunes, it’s Apple’s online music store where you can sample and purchase music. I had a ball playing with iTunes because of the sheer number of tracks available. When you walk into a “bricks and mortar” music shop like HMV you can see a reasonable selection of music but to actually sample is a pain in the ass. I can’t really remember the last time I bought a CD to be honest. With the advent of iTunes, a reasonably cheap ($1 CAD per song in Canada) legal form of music downloading has become available.
Apparently the Australian iTunes Music Store is ready to serve tunes which is good news. While there has been no official news from Apple confirming the launch and as I check the Apple Australia site and itunes.com.au at the time of writing it doesn’t appear to be available yet, which is a bit disconcerting because today is the 28th, the rumoured launch day. Most of the rumours have been coming as a result of Australian actor (and ahem…musician) Russell Crowe leaking that his music will be available on iTunes for $1.80 per track. Another local musician, DJ Bexta, has also stated her tracks will be available. I wonder how much of this leaking of information isn’t just some well timed press coverage by Apple ensuring solid traffic to iTunes at start-up.
My main concern is the price. I appreciated that Canada iTunes could keep the price at 99c per track even though the US iTunes is also 99c per track. So far the rumours for Australia is anywhere from $1.30 to $1.80. One dollar is such a nice round number. I assume the price is heavily determined by negotiation with local music companies for licensing fees.
While in Canada I also sampled Napster (which has a horrible colour theme on its website) and read a bit into the current MP3 and digital download industry. ITunes was by far my favourite purely based on the simple price. Napster has a subscription offering as well as a single price option but files won’t stay active unless you keep your subscription. Add to that certain files can’t be downloaded onto certain mp3 players (which is also a limitation with iTunes) and it all got too complicated.
In my opinion, while iTunes is a big step in the right direction there still isn’t an ideal offering – an mp3 store where I pay $1 per track and I can do whatever I want with the music – download to any mp3 player, play on my computer and burn to CD. I understand the need to halt illegal reproduction and distribution of the files but the balance at the moment is still too restrictive making the illegal file sharing offerings such as LimeWire and Soulseek that much more appealing to users.
