Everyone Wants To Offer The Next iTunes

from the copycats-r-us dept

Tue, Jun 10th 2003 2:32am — Mike Masnick

With the initial success of Apple's iTunes downloadable music store, it appears that plenty of other companies are scrambling to set up iTunes clones. Of course, many of these efforts are likely going to be "me too" plays that won't go very far. Apple did a great job putting their offering together - and to hype it to the right level before opening the doors, thus guaranteeing huge initial demand (though, some analysts are now skeptical as to how long it will keep up). I'm not convinced that a similar copycat offering from an AOL or a Yahoo will have quite the same impact, though it's unlikely to stop them. It would be a lot more impressive if one of these companies worked out a way to offer much more than iTunes, such as music files that didn't come with restrictive digital rights management or a system that really added the benefit of music sharing as opposed to music downloading.

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Alvaro, 10 Jun 2003 @ 2:09pm

@ 99c a song?!?!?!
Mike, although I think Apple has done a grat job with iTunes, I'm still not convinced that a singe song is worth 99c considering I just saved the company all the distribution and packaging costs of the CD I never bought. The advantages of using the internet as an efficient distribution medium are all for Apple, I get none of that money back.
Saludos,
Alvaro
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Mike (profile), 10 Jun 2003 @ 2:35pm

Re: @ 99c a song?!?!?!
Mike, although I think Apple has done a grat job with iTunes, I'm still not convinced that a singe song is worth 99c considering I just saved the company all the distribution and packaging costs of the CD I never bought. The advantages of using the internet as an efficient distribution medium are all for Apple, I get none of that money back.

Hi Alvaro!

I agree absolutely, which is what I said when iTunes first launched. I also think that Apple's iTunes stores has coasted on hype up to this point. So, I think that other copycat sites won't be able to do nearly as well.

Mike
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