This started as a comment to Dan’s post here; so read that first if you want the context of this response.
Actually, this is probably the best way for them to go. The current iTunes model won’t hold up too much longer, since even at $1 per song, people won’t continue to pay that much forever, so they have to come up with another idea.
Flat-rate subscription is the in thing right now; it’s been around for a long time in things like cable TV and internet service, and is now becoming popular with other consumer media products (video rentals specifically, with NetFlix & Blockbuster online).
I should preface my opinion on the whole online music thing by saying that I don’t buy stuff using iTunes (or Napster, etc.), and I very rarely download songs for free either, unless it is some really obscure (usually old) artist that stores don’t sell CDs for. (Either that or independent bands that offer their stuff for free legally).
As for copy protection and the record companies trying to prevent unauthorized copying, they will (and should) continue to try to implement new security measures and users will continue to get around them.
They’ll never be able to get away from perfect digital copies leaking out to the file sharing networks until they can get away from the classic audio CD format, which means making discs that won’t play in regular CD players. Right now, they can’t do that since a huge percentage of their customers already have and rely on those standard players in their cars or homes, and aren’t willing to go out an buy a whole new player device.
This is why they are pinning their hopes on tackling the computer usage of their material. It’s actually a pretty good strategy, since there are several “winning” approaches that they can go for:
- Make it so dang easy to do it the way they want you to (as in the article above) that a lot of people would rather just pay a few bucks and take the easy route (Thus the strategy of integration with Windows, as mentioned above). This method currently works pretty well for DVDs. Yes, people can and do copy movies, but nowhere near as much as they do music. The vast majority of the population has gotten used to paying a few bucks (or a monthly subscription) to RENT, and a higher price if they want to buy a copy of their own.
- If they do #1 good enough, they can supplement it by playing the “moral” card, and telling people “why not just pay a few bucks and not break the law?”
Anyway, I do have a couple more random thoughts on this general subject:
- I think iPods in general are a rip off.
- Apple deserves being beaten yet again by MS. People like to think of Apple as the flower-power hippie company, but the fact is they’re just as money hungry as MS, they just haven’t been as successful. If they would only release their OS on the i386 platform (or open-source it), Bill Gates would be sweating bullets, but they won’t do this because Steve Jobs doesn’t want to lose the proprietary hardware sales.
- Even though I’m not a big supporter of music piracy, I DO hope that it causes the eventual collapse of the current record industry as we know it. Personally, I think it would be great if no one could ever make a huge amount of money by playing music professionally - and I’m not being sarcastic. Then we would be left with the artists who are just doing it as a creative expression, perhaps even in their spare time. I’d rather listen to honest music than well polished music any day.
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i’m generally afraid of subscription services, just because i’m so flighty. i think they should do $1 for new/popular songs and .25 for older stuff. at a quarter a pop, i’d go crazy on itunes, but for a buck i think, “well for the same price i can get it from bmg and actually have a cover…”
I’m the same way re: subscriptions; I think they’re banking on the fact that (like with most flat-rate charge products or services) very few users will actually take advantage to the fullest extent, and most will probably end up paying more than they otherwise would have.
The Netflix model is a good example of this; I’d bet that a lot of people would not have otherwise spent > $20 every month on movies. I could be wrong on this, but it’s just my guess. Same with hardware “service plans” (most people will never use them, within the period they’re good for) and all-you-can-eat buffets (there’s only so much crappy food you can fit in your body in one sitting, and they make it cheap enough that it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to eat more than they paid for).
Similarly, I think that for the price of this service they’re proposing, people will probably end up getting more music, but most of them wouldn’t have spent $15 every month on buying music anyway, so in the end, they will be taking in more money than they otherwise would have.
I can only real comment on a couple things here because I am so burnt on other things.
1. You cannot say, “Apple deserves being beaten yet again by MS”. By beaten up, do you mean stealing Apples innovation and packaging it into there own box. Bill Gates is a thief for all I am concerned.
2. You cannot say, “[apple is] just as money hungry as MS”. Has Apple been served anti-trust suites, deemed monopolistic by governments, ripped off software from smaller companies, or did Apple ever fund SCO to cripple open source. MS or Micro$oft is greedy and monopolistic.
3. You cannot say, “iPods in general are a rip off”. Media players that are similar are $50 dollars cheaper and are totally clunky, the UI in the competition is the reason why the iPod is the biggest seller, and look at the Sony network walkman, a real “ipod killer” is $50 more. A rip off, no, maybe the mini, but I think it too is worth it, especially since I bought Sara a pink one for Christmas.
4. Service plans do not work in most circumstances. Netflix is the exception for some. Netflix pays for itself if you rent more then 5 DVD’s a month at Blockbuster, or in our past situation, 3 DVD’s due to late charges. And this doesn’t include the benefit of Netflix’s model.
In reverse order…
4. I think we’re saying the same thing about service plans: they “work” for the company, not the customer. I do think that if they do it right though, they may get plenty of suckers to go for it.
3. I’ll have to concede the iPod thing, since I’ve never really used one. I probably should have said “they seem like a ripoff to me”. I use my PDA, which has an MP3/OGG player application with a Winamp-copy UI on it that is good enough for me, and it was free (free software, I’m not counting the cost of the PDA since I would have had that anyway).
2 & 1 - I’m not trying to make MS out to be a benevolent company or anything, I’m just saying that I’ve heard several interviews from people who know (or knew) Steve Jobs really well (first and foremost being Steve Wozniak, the co-founder) who basically say that Jobs is all about the money and marketing, and that if he had lucked/schemed into the position of power that Gates did in those early rounds of the OS wars, he’d probably have turned out very similarly.
The evidence that supports this for me is that if Apple really did want to take a chunk out of Windows sales, and benefit the consumer at the same time, they could easily port their OS to run on other platforms like Intel, etc. and compete with Windows. If they wanted to go one step further and really benefit the community, they could make it open source. But they aren’t doing this (even the first step - porting, not to mention open source), according to sources close to Jobs, because they don’t want to lose out on the proprietary hardware sales that go with it.
One of Job’s first actions when he took back the reigns of the company a while ago was to kill the Apple clone licensing deals and make them the sole provider of the hardware again. That was a step which basically insured that they will never beat Windows, and he should have known that, but he let his ego (and greed) get in the way.
Your statement sort of contradicts itself. If Jobs went into the arena of licensing there OS then Jobs would make more money by competing with Windows, no doubt, especially since MS is getting such a bad rap on security right now. Jobs is a smart guy, I think he would understand that more money is in licensing, and if he was so greedy he would go this route. Jobs turned the company around from nothing to something, so turning off the cloning was a deal the company had to do.
Opening up there OS through open-source would kill Apple, they are not about to do that. Benefit or not. MS would never do that.
Apple computers are expensive but they are reasonable, look at the big companies out there selling laptops that are designed properly. Non bulky laptops are expensive, fast powerhouse computers are expensive (and the g5 is the fastest out right now, and its price is still reasonable for the market), great designed computers are very expensive (the sexy computers). Apple started the design game, it works, and other computer manufactures followed right along, and by doing so they have no produced a cheaper machine. Maybe a faster one, but this will change when Motorola comes out with dual-core before intel and amd, and they get there G5 running a little cooler.
Sorry for the babble, gots to go!
The clone situation was different than porting the OS to other platforms; it was basically the worst of both worlds: no “standard” control, but still an expensive hardware base, just being made by someone else.
I still think Apple would take a short term loss (on hardware sales) if they made an Intel version of OSX, since there is plenty of PC hardware out there that are just as fast (if not faster - I’ve posted about this before, so let’s not get into that on this post) than the Mac hardware, at a lower price.
I don’t know how much this would be offset by the increase in OS sales; sure there would be some, but the average joe will stick with Windows at first, since that’s what they know. The smaller group that’s left over will either continue to use an alternative (free - Linux, etc.), or pirate OSX, and some may actually go out and buy it. The only question is whether this would be a net profit for them in the first few quarters of sales, since that is what Jobs is looking at.
As for “sexy” computers, all I can say is I like computers, just not in that way… I couldn’t care less what it looks like, as long as it works.
Yeah…we could speculate all day what or who Steve Jobs is, Hitler or a siant, either way I like apple and I think they are doing the right thing. Although, I would love to see OSX sit next to windows on the store shelves as a OS for amd or intel chips and sets, but it isnt going to happen any time soon.
I stand by apple, if there wasnt the osx OS, I would still think about buying the ibook, or g5 maybe even the “overpriced” powerbook. Apple designs are second to none, the powerbook design is awesome, and the new iMac are great. And for the towers you cannot get any faster then a dual G5, sorry, but I have done plenty of research.
So after saying this, why doesnt apple make systems to run windows? The amin reason is because most are just plain too slow, including the “overpriced” powerbook.
You said people would, “pirate OSX” well I know people would pirate OSX a lot less then Windows, the main reason is “why pay for something that you dont like”, “why pay a company that I hate”, and “they have enough money”.
With my defense of Apple done; Microsoft is not cool, and Napster is just another puppet of the uncool giant.
That’s cool. My take on it is that i agree that MS isn’t cool, open source is, and Apple is somewhere in between. I was just saying they’re a lot closer to the MS end of the scale than to the cooler open source end.
One last note, regarding piracy: I think that unless it is way cheaper than Windows, it would be pirated just as much. I’m not some kind of anti-piracy nazi or anything, but I do believe that most people pirate stuff just because they don’t want to pay the money, not because MS “doesn’t deserve it”. People like to say this, but I think it’s BS. Case in point: you probably like the companies that make a lot of the the video editing software, etc. that you use (at least like them more than M$), so do you pay for all of their stuff?
Yes and no, I figure software should be paid for if you are making money off of it. If I ever made ScatteredMedia my job I would have to buy a lot of software.
But any software that is affordable and usefull I buy. For example, antivirus software, Quicken, Movies, little $20 apps like sidetrack for apple, and 1/2 of mp3’s.
About an affordable mac:
check this out,
http://thinksecret.com/news/0412expo2.html
Re: the affordable Mac - that actually looks like a pretty good deal, if you’re willing to accept the limitations of the Mac platform (heh heh), but most users don’t go crazy on customizing and tweaking their machines anyway, so that would probably be fine for them.