Friends Don’t Let Friends Use iTunes
The subject of where to get one’s non-CD music from (because that’s the way we roll these days) has come up several times before. In the last edition Dennis commented on his surprise that more people hadn’t left the mostly still DRM encumbered and low quality lands of iTunes for the emerald pastures of Amazon (which offers 256Kbps audio, DRM free). Over at Electronista today they have a post on exactly that issue.
A recent industrial research survey by the NPD group shows that only 10% of Amazon’s users are converts from iTunes, and iTunes also only holds 6% of the total market share of music sales in the US (compared to 19% for iTunes, 15% for Wal-Mart and 13% for Best Buy) which is actually a decrease in relative market share from 6.7% last spring.
Maria commented last time that she though the average iTunes user probably was just buying a couple of songs they heard on the radio, and likely doesn’t care about 128Kbps bitrates. I think that’s bang on. The thing about Apple is that everyone and their mom recognizes the brandname instantly. I would hazard a pretty whopping guess that the majority of people do not distinguish between “iPod” and “MP3 player” or “online MP3 retailer” and “iTunes”, let alone caring about the difference between 128Kbps and 256Kbps or AAC vs. MP3. They just want to get a copy of “Soulja Boy” they can play on their pink iPod Nano.
In fact, since most of the music purchasing audience probably doesn’t give a crap about technical specifications at all, it’s not terribly surprising that more companies haven’t pushed ridiculously-high-quality (specifically, lossless) digital recordings. The increase in users this would attract versus the expenditure is probably negligible for outlets which make most of their money from mass-market sales.
On the other hand, this is probably why DG is very smart to have 320Kbps audio available. Classical listeners are stereotypically extremely concerned with audio quality, and a classical store offering higher quality recordings will poach a significant fraction of classical downloaders from other sources. I would guess the same is true for jazz as well, another genre with more than it’s fair share of audiophiles, but since I can’t stand jazz I dunno if there are any specialty high-quality retailers out there.
In the end, there has to be a financial incentive for a company to offer high quality recordings, and currently there is no widespread public demand for this. Joe Consumer is far more concerned with having a pretty interface than downloading DRM free music. I suspect this will only change when either Amazon becomes a real threat to iTunes, or when seamless transferral of music to relatively high quality reproduction systems (see: not listening through crappy earbuds) is commonplace. Or perhaps music will get dragged along with the demand for HD video transmissions.
Here’s to the day when we can download lossless HD music in glorious 50.1 surround sound. Until then I am pretty content with 320Kbps.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:02 am
My wife is a big fan of the iTunes software, but I prefer Windows Media player (even though I’m not a big fan of microsoft). However, both of these “tools” and the one I have to use to get music into my Sony mp3 player are so prepriotary that I end up with numberous copies of the same song on different locations on the hard drive.
And ALL of them are trying to get me to purchase songs from their sites. Ack!!!!
Stop the Marketing, I want to get off.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Might I point out that you don’t have to listen to material acquired through iTunes with crappy earbuds? I listen to it (classical and jazz for the most part) with quite good Sennheiser earphones on my iPod and a pretty good home stereo system, and it sounds good enough to me. (Perhaps my hearing has deteriorated to the point that I can’t tell what’s wrong with the sound.) I think that a lot of the bad reputation iTunes and iPod have in some quarters is due to the fact that most users seem to stick with the aforesaid earbuds.
Naturally, I can’t spend half my annual income on high-level analog reproduction equipment, so I don’t qualify as an “audiophile,” but we peons must make do.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Jon,
Have you ever tried comparing ripped audio at different bitrates on your iPod? I totally bet that you can easily distinguish between 128Kbps AAC (equivalentish to 160Kbps MP3) and 320Kbps MP3 for a piece you know, especially on the bits where a lot is happening. Quality audio always seems to me to be a sort of ratchet: as soon as you hear a particular piece of music on a better reproduction system, it’s pretty hard to go back to the poorer one.
Sure, it’s not *that* bad, but I can definitely tell the difference in quality on my pretty unimpressive sound system (which cost around 1/100th of my yearly income, and that’s on a graduate student salary…) Given that other retailers offer better quality for the same or less cost, and without DRM, the choice is easy for me.
April 18th, 2008 at 9:18 am
My basic view on this sort of question is that all sound reproduction is sound reproduction; it’s not the real thing, and inevitably it’s not as good as the real thing. The basic question is which reproductions a given individual is satisfied with listening to.
It’s like photographs of paintings in a museum. One can argue over whose photograph of the Mona Lisa is the best till the cows return to their domiciles, but they’re all photographs of the original.
My interest is much more in the quality of the performance of a piece: are the musicians doing a good job creating a musical experience. Similarly: is Picasso, for instance, doing a good job of creating a visual aesthetic experience?
I tend to leave arguments about which music reproduction technology is “the best” to those who are interested in that question.
As for DRM, since my portable music player is an iPod, I don’t care about that issue. It plays ordinary MP3s and ripped CDs, as well as iTunes downloads, so I’m happy. I know many folks think that DRM is a vital political issue, but I think war, poverty, and global warming are vital political issues, thank you.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
DRM is really a non-issue, but it’s prominence in the discussion obscures the real issues over sound quality. DRM is easily removed from any iTunes or other DRM’d file: Burn it to a disc as a part of a music CD, then just rip it from the disc back onto your hard drive as an MP3 file. Presto! - it will then be DRM-free.
The real issue is sound quality (i.e. bitrates). Itunes’ platry 128 on most files is driving the market downward and making such low-level sound quality seem acceptable to too many people. In the age of digital high-speed internet, it is not unreasonable to expect distributors to offer higher bitrates for people who care about sound quality. If I’m going to pay for a song or album (especially since iTunes, DG, and Amazon are often only marginally cheaper than store-bought CDs), I want it to be the highest quality possible.
Bitrate might not make much difference when listening through earbuds, but I don’t only listen to my iPod. I like to burn my music to a disc so I can listen on my real stereo system, and in that instance the bitrates really make a huge difference. You can very noticably tell the difference between the sound quality coming from my stereo with a disc burned from 128 or 160 compared with say 256, 320, or lossless (even between just 128 and 192 there is a noticable difference - especially in the bass and percussion).
If CDs are to be gradually supplanted by digital downloading as a primary means of music distribution, lossless is the way to go. This is where a band like Radiohead really screwed up and proved their “online album release” was a mere marketing ploy. If they were really interersted in cutting out the middle-man (i.e. the record company) and going directly to their fans, they should have offered the download in lossless or at least 320 bitrate at minimum. Instead they went with a paltry 160.
More and more, downloading or ordering the disc over the internet is the only way to get some albums, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect higher quality. The local Borders and Barnes & Noble stores have utterly emasculated their classical music sections in the past two to three years. The selection has dwindled to about one-fourth to one-fifth what it was just two years ago. So, if getting good music at a local retail store is no longer a viable option, I want downloads to be as high quality as possible.
April 19th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Well, to state the obvious, we can snap up CDs from online merchants as long as the companies still make them, and rip them ourselves. I agree that the brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing rapidly, even in a large city like mine.
(This is assuming that the way to go is digital, rather than spending the big bucks for a turntable and tube amplifier.)
But the best course is to patronize live concerts and recitals as much as possible. I repeat that no recording can compete with live performance.