Earlier this week, Apple Inc. and the iTunes store made a deal with EMI Group that will tear down a lot of walls within the music industry. This is terrific news for the people who buy all their music online and play by all the rules and would never even think of pirating music. Unfortunately, the only people who fall into this category are the executives at Apple and EMI.
The companies have agreed to make most music owned by EMI available on iTunes without copyright protection. What this means is that purchased music will be transferable and compatible with formats other than those designed by Apple. They're making it easier for the music to be pirated, but they're also making it more consumer-friendly and universal. Ultimately, this is probably a good idea, because it's a step in the direction of making music more open to the public and universally compatible, which is not a bad thing - despite what Metallica may say.
But what doesn't make a lot of sense is that Apple and iTunes have already basically cornered the market. They have the easiest interface, constant updates on their music selection and the most popular and best-selling portable MP3 player of all time. ITunes and the iPod are the dominant forces on the market.
The stipulation to this is that these tracks are going to cost 30 cents more than your average track. They come with less copyright protection, but they cost more, and that's going to add up quickly. What's strange, though, is that Apple and EMI are saying that even though the new tracks cost more, they are of a higher audio quality than the apparently pathetic recordings we've been downloading off iTunes for the past couple of years. This means that iTunes has been holding out on us, selling us music that wasn't up to its ultimate potential.
But with this new deal, artists like the Rolling Stones, who have previously not had their songs up for sale in the iTunes store, will now be available for purchase. And this is a step in the right direction. iTunes is great and you can find a lot of really good, really rare music through it, but unless iTunes can get the rights to sell songs by major artists like The Dave Clark 5, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, it will never really live up to its potential. In fact, as of right now, I cannot download one song by Led Zeppelin through the iTunes store, but I can download 26 versions of "Achy Breaky Heart," including the music video, which, if you haven't seen it, is hypnotically horrible.
The Beatles, and the members' subsequent solo projects, are the most blatant absence in the iTunes catalog, and if music companies are worried about pirating then artist absence is the biggest problem. If people can't get the best and most popular music through legal downloading means, then they will find illegal ways to do it - it's that simple.
The EMI chief executive said that the two companies were "working on it" in regards to bringing the Beatles' music to iTunes. But hell, the Cubs have been "working on" a World Series for the better part of a century now, so I wouldn't get too excited.
Acquiring good music should take some sort of prescience over certain technical advancements. This isn't to say that adding the Rolling Stones to iTunes isn't a step in the right direction, but it is still a far cry from adding the Beatles, who were purposefully left out of the EMI deal. So we're getting "Satisfaction," but it's no "Help!"
Write to Paul at pjmetz@bsu.edu
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