ITunes Music Store
The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is a paid online music service run by Apple Computer, introduced on April 28, 2003 with iTunes 4.
- Pricing: Cost to download, most songs cost 99 cents (US), most albums cost $9.99 (US)
- Platform(s): Mac OS X (not Mac OS Classic), Windows 2000 and Windows XP
- Downloading: Yes
- Burning/Copying: Yes
- Streaming: No
- Radio: Yes (built into iTunes)
- Format(s): AAC/MPEG-4
- Digital Rights Management: Up to 3 computers, unlimited CDs (10 with an unchanged playlist), unlimited iPods
- Preview: 30 seconds
- Trial: N/A
- Catalog: 400,000 files; includes audio books; originally iTMS contained about 200,000 files
- Features: Allowance, gift certificates
- Global availability: US addressee credit-card holders only
The iTunes Music Store
Songs are encoded by Dolby's Advanced Audio Codec, which is part of the MPEG-4 standard and QuickTime 6 and is usually considered superior to MP3 in terms of 128 kbit/s encoding quality.
Originally only Mac OS X users who had credit cards with a U.S. billing address could buy songs with the service, but Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, announced plans to support both Windows and international users. The Windows version of iTunes, and support for the Windows platform from the iTunes Music Store was announced on October 16th, 2003, with immediate availability.
Fans and some executives in the music industry say that the Music Store has more attractive characterstics than previous services such as Rhapsody and MusicNet: it allows the user to legally purchase an unlimited number of songs and transfer them to the iPod, and is comparatively simple and easy to use because it is closely integrated into the iPod and iTunes product lines. Currently, the iPod is the only digital music player that works with the iTunes Music Store (however other players work with iTunes), and iTunes Music Store is the only music store available for iPod users.
Apple's FairPlay Digital rights management (DRM) is integrated into iTunes, which manages songs purchased from iTunes Music Store. To convert protected files to MP3-format files, the user must burn them on an audio CD and then rip the CD back to iTunes using the MP3 encoder, resulting in slight loss of quality.
The store sold about 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours and more than 1,000,000 tracks in its first week. When released for Windows, it was downloaded more than 1,000,000 times in the first 3 days and more than 1,000,000 songs were sold in that period.
Currently, new songs are added each Tuesday, and beginning with Moby on July 29, 2003, independent artists are now included.
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