iTunes online music store in UK
iTunes online music store is finally up and running in the UK. To start with, they have a collection of 700,000 songs for sale, each for 79 pence (the price in France/Germany is 99 Euro cents and in the States is 99 Dollar cents per track), which is fair enough, although considering the exchange rate between Pound Sterling and US Dollar - which is around 1.85 - the price for UK customers should be something around 65 pence. I suppose they add VAT to every track sold, I'm not sure though.
Napster also started its UK online store 2 weeks before Apple, but for me the iTunes offer is more attractive. Firstly you don't need to pay a monthly subscription fee for iTunes, just click on the song you like, download whenever you want and pay a fix price, whereas in Napster you pay 9.95 pounds a month for subscription fee, and may get tracks for 88 pence each if you buy a group of them at the same time - more expensive overall.
Secondly, iTunes has 200,000 more songs available for download, comparing to Napster.
However, iTunes online store has two downsides too: You can either burn the music on CD, or play them on iPod, you can't play them on other MP3 players in the market. But hey, is there anyone out there who would want to waste his money on any other portable music player? ;-)
Moreover, you can buy from the UK store only using credit cards, they don't accept Switch or Solo debit cards which are popular with many youngsters and international (non-EU) students.
Even if you don't want to buy, iTunes gives you 30-second free high quality preview of the tracks you want, so it's an excellent tool for browsing music albums and finding the information about the songs you like. In time if prices go down online stores will definitely attract a lot of customers, especially people who prefer to download music rather than to buy it mostly for the sake of convenience. It's also an excellent chance for new bands to distribute their music quicker to a much broader audience.
Finally, if you just want to listen to a high quality music (streaming style) and do not want to download and keep it, OD2 has an excellent system called "Sonic Selector" that costs only 1 penny per track!! This is really useful for instance when you're throwing a party and want to have access to as many music tracks as possible for that specific occasion and maybe in a specific genre or theme, but don't want to pay much money for it. Say you're having a party fro 10 PM to 5 AM in the next morning (7 hours of music = 420 minutes), assuming the average length of each track to be 4 minutes:
420 ÷ 4 = 105 tracks required ≡ 105 pence ≅ only ONE pound!
It is rediculously cheap!
There may be no relation between the price for each track in the US and UK. Companies usually have different pricing policies in different regions of the world and in the Uk or Europe as a whole pricing has nothing to do with america. As you see apple has lower prices than napster, they usually set the prices to the highest competitive price possible. For example everybody knows that iPod could be sold for much cheaper and still bring profit to apple, but for example here in France with the current price it is still the best product in market, and i'm sure apple will not reduce the price before a serious competitor appears in the market.
(at June 15, 2004 07:31 PM)
yes i use itunes to find which songs I like and the band, correct name, etc and then download it from kazaa :))
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