The rise of e-music commerce

Apple's iTunes Music Store offers new hope for indie artists and labels

Can e-music commerce change the industry? The question is reasonable considering the recent success of iTunes Music Store which, in only eight weeks, sold more than five million songs.
Even analysts are somewhat surprised at Apple's success. In one swift move, the company managed to obtain agreements by all the major record labels and commercialize tunes legally via internet.
Following false starts by Pressplay and other sites dedicated to musical e-commerce, here comes the revolutionary ITMS. The rules are simple and few: quality and speed are the weapons that have guaranteed its success.
Apple's victory, at the moment, is that it was able to convince all music labels, major and independent, to go along with the same rules. The iTunes Music Store is fast and simple to use, and fair to the artists and record companies. In a nutshell, you can play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.
At the moment these services are only available in the United States for users of Macs running OS X. Imagine the enormous potential when other markets open up, especially once a PC version of iTunes is released, which is scheduled for the end of this year.
Other such realities are slowly surfacing, such as buymusic.com which offers its services only to PC users; or even Roxio which spent a fortune buying the rights to the Napster name, and then the Pressplay site.
Buymusic.com, the new company in the Buy.com group, is built entirely with Microsoft proprietary software and aims at replicating the initial success of the iTunes Music Store with the general public that uses, specifically, the Windows operating system.
However 40 million dollars in marketing wasn't enough to make buymusic.com as successful as ITMS, probably because of the different restrictions accompanying every song sold.
Newer tracks have more restrictions than older ones so, for example, a Tears for Fears song offers unlimited burning and transfers to digital player, but can only be played on one computer. Another artist's song, instead, can be played on three registered computers but maybe it can only be burned to CD three times. These are small restrictions that, however, cause confusion at times and problems for the end user.
The philosophy behind ITMS gives way to a new market, a market where major and independent record labels are the same. Perhaps it's a tad premature to talk about new musical frontiers thanks to digital technology. However, the potential is huge, especially if future strategies include newer and added services.
Without marketing, without scouting, without those intermediaries whose value only exists in a world of mass marketing and mass distribution, and where music of value (economic) are only the blockbusters that sell millions of copies and are recorded by formulaic musicians, ITMS is the perfect medicine.
If it's true that these services could, theoretically, do away with piracy and thus appease the major record labels, it's also true the roles by these companies will be greatly diminished in an open market.

Publication Date: 2003-08-10
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3025