1. My complaint, as a Mac using iPod owner, is not the lack of portability, but the lack of accessibility. I can't use Napster or Rhapsody, even though I want to, because I'm not on a PC running Windows XP. Why can't I? As far as I can tell, it has to do with the DRM that Microsoft has encoded into the Windows Media files that these services use, and their unwillingness to release a WMP for the Mac that will decode it. Why haven't they? I don't know, except that it affords them a chance to squeeze Apple.

Apple's iTMS model isn't perfect, but at least it makes some sense from a business standpoint: Why open up your system when it's making plenty of money by being closed? And from what I understand, it wouldn't be that difficult to add WMA functionality to the iPod once, at some point in the future, the iTMS dominance of the online music scene comes to a close. It's a matter of milking the dominance for all its worth before hitting that tipping point. Besides, the initial outlay to try Apple's service is ridiculously cheap -- a free download of iTunes and $.99 to buy a song (before you decide you need/want an iPod; then it does get pricey) -- whereas for me, the Mac user, I have to buy a whole new computer and pony up $15 before a single note begins to play.

I know, I know: I'm on a niche platform. The Mac doesn't have a market share to warrant my inclusion. Which is why I haven't been screaming from the rooftops about this. But it serves to illustrate my point that Apple is not the only one to blame in all of this. It's not as though Napster and Rhapsody are allowing downloads of songs in some cross-platform, open source format. They're selling something that's DRMed up just as tightly as an iTunes download, if not more so.

"Plays For Sure" my ---.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by GC in CA

2. I will rent music and love it. I can afford to own one cd a month and i would rather spend that money "renting" and listening to thousands of songs legally than owning 12 new songs a month.

how many people go to the movie theatre? you "rent" the movie for less than 2 hours and you don't "own" it.

many other examples of things you enjoy for a price and then is gone can be made.

i don't smoke, buy street drugs or consume large quantities of alchol.

I can afford to rent thousands of songs $20 bucks or less a month

if you have to buy every song you want to listen to for $1 a pop so you can own it
GO AHEAD!

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by David

3. I sort of echo the previous commenter (the Ipod owner). Play for Sure, my.... I'm paying 6.99 a month to Yahoo, great I can listen to anything I want...at home. It makes more sense to buy right now as my Creative Zen Jukebox is not one of the devices that can handle the songs. And no one knows when that will happen.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Chuck

4. The reason Nap/Real is compared to itunes is BECAUSE they want us to do the comparison. They are selling themselves as cheaper tan filling an ipod, remember? But it's NOT the same thing.

music rental is for a) people on an extreme budget, b) people who stream record. That's a market but not much of a market.

it is NOT comparable to film rental - when I rent a movie, it's complete, I don't have to play movie editor and put it together - in renting musicm every month or more, I have to spend hours, tens/hundreds of hours re-arranging and sorting tracks for music I like enough to listen BUT NOT to own?

People do not have enough time to load their ipod, they want to play DJ for tracks they don't own?

Not likely.

Yes, it's a business but just because it has a monthly revenue stream does not make it a business everyone should get into (how that MS watch OS business doing?) exactly the same limited audience - Yahoo has now set the benchamrk at $5 but since they are just interested in eyeballs and selling clicks, it's brilliant for them since $5 might really mean another $20 from that user alone in ad clicks and adwords ... Real & nap are dead at anything above $5 a month.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by jbelkin

5. Brad, the cable tv analogy doesn't work. The way people typically listen to music is substantially different from the way they watch tv and movies. A movie or tv show is usually consumed only ONCE. We're willing to subscribe to cable tv because we see value in receiving a continuous supply of NEW content. On the other hand, a song or album is usually kept in a library so that it can be listened to many times. This makes music unique. Only a small niche will be willing to subscribe to a stand-alone music service to get a constant inflow of new content (you and me included, actually). However, the vast majority will be reluctant to subscribe because of the prospect of being cut off from their (virtual) music library if they discontinue service. You're right that the music subscription model will ultimately succeed. But never as a stand-alone service. It will happen only when it is integrated with other communication services (phone, cable tv) that people see the value in subscribing to and are highly unlikely to cancel.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Gary

6. A couple of points: As far as the format wars go, both sides are responsible for the turmoil. While Apple uses AAC (a standard), it does not license it's DRM (Fairplay). So far, I can't blame them- they're at the top of the heap, and iPods are selling well, why should they? OTOH, MS is trying to push their proprietary format (WMA), and we all know where MS's proprietary formats land us. The other companies are trying to ride the MS coat-tails, like they have (so successfully) in the past, but they're having much more trouble now. I guess times are changing. One thing is for sure, Apple has definitely done their homework on this issue, and they have proven beyond a doubt that people (thus far) prefer the "own" model over subscription services. They won't let this lucritive market go either, they will continue to do their research, and if subscription services prove to be lucritive, they will surely go after that market too.

I agree with the above poster about Cable, but would also like to add that when Cable TV first came out, it was leaps and bounds better than traditional TV with regards to quality. That was probably the biggest reason households sucked up Cable like water. The channels and movies were a secondary, not so important factor, and indeed today, HBO and the likes are still trying to find a way to get everyone on board.

I'm not sure what you mean by features when you say the other players are more feature rich than the iPod. Other than an FM tuner (which IMO defeats the purpose of a portable digital music player), the iPod has all the features you need. Apple also made it not only easy to create peripherals, but lucritive for third party companies. The digital output pretty much opens the door to a vast area of exploration in peripherals (as you can see by the market response).

Apparently consumers think the iPod is superior too, and agree with Mossberg.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by jdoc

7.
Good comments, all. Concerning the argument that people would rather own music than rent it, I believe that argument is stuck in the present moment. Clearly, it is true for now. But I believe that in the future the distinction between between ownership and access (let's stop calling it rental) will be erased. Local storage, network storage--they will feel the same to consumers. Then, *access* becomes the only point, and consumers will migrate to whatever solution is most convenient and inexpensive. Content will reside locally for a while (like Web pages in a browser cache), but its locality will not be defended as it is now. In a robustly wireless world, "portability" will have a different meaning, and big hard drives won't have much to do with it.

A-la-carte and subscriptions are both primitive and unworthy of ideal music consumption. The talking points of each will be obsolete soon enough.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Brad Hill

8. "renting" music is a temporary "solution" to avoid paying more to own music. the more you rent, the bigger the hole you're digging yourself into. should your service of choice become obsolete, what happens to all the money you've pumped into this music? it might be convenient for some, but it's not a very smart way to invest in something.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by lee

9.
lee: If your service provider goes out of business, you switch to another and load up again. Not a smart investment? We're talking about 60 dollars a year (equal to four CDs or 61 iTMS downloads) to feel like you own over a million tracks. Seems like a great investment to me.

I wonder how many people who object to the subscription model have actually lived with it. Everyone I show it to is floored by how wonderful it is. I regard my Rhapsody account as the kind of service I can't live without, and I don't know how I ever did live without it. It's almost as important to me as high-speed Internet. Theoretical rejection of subscriptions is one thing, but maybe it's more unusual for the rejection to follow living with it for a few months.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Brad Hill

10. In today's word, as Bill supposedly noted, superiority has nothing to do with it. The Apple Mac, IMO, has superior HW and SW, but controls only a small percentage of the computer market when compared to the crap boxes and buggy, bloated, and malware-prone SW from the others side. People don't care.

The iPod is not about what sounds best or what has the most features. It is about being cool and what you want to be seen with. You want over-priced, child-labor produced Nikes or the Wal-Mart no-name shoes? Most people would take the Nikes.

The bottom line is this: if you want a real iPod, get one and quit whining. If you don't care about having an iPod, get something else and quit whining. What links these two thing?
a) Get what you want
b) Quit whining.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Don

11. Apple is doing the right thing for their business at this moment, and they will be making the correct business decisions in the future.

Today we are limited by the storage on our DAPs, and it just so happens that the iPod is the most convienent and most popular DAP to access thousands of songs. Can you imagine when the world is blanketed in WiMax/3G/Etc and you have high speed internet access everywhere? We'll have access to millions of songs stored on remote servers. Apple will introduce iTunes subscription based service where your iPod will remotely access the entire library, or maybe portions of the library, with the best interface to search millions of songs in the palm of your hand.

Rhapsody and Napster are simply ahead of their time. Apple is raking in the dough now because they are giving the consumer what they want, ownership and ease of use. When the wireless technology is available at the right speed, Apple will give us "access" and ease of use. Simple!

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by GuywithSocks

12. Ok I dont get it. The other players have more featuers? which features?

I want to buy a DAP and have been looking at the Ipod vs Zen, vs. Iriver. What do I want: A player that can play music, allow me to browse it appropiately and categorize it both on the player as well as on the computer (e.g. song ratings) and syncronize this information.

What I have been able to find is that only the Ipod allows you to do that. Or did I missed any other player?

Now it some other player would allow you to do that AND access a subscription service it could be better. But up to know the only one I have seen which allows to do somethign as simple as a syncronized star rating on the DAP is the ipod

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by hextor

13.
hextor: Sounds like the iPod is right for you. I don't say it's wrong for everyone, but it's wrong for me. The missing features I refer to are voice recording, line-in recording, FM reception, and onboard EQ, all of which are quickly becoming standard features while being ignored by Apple.

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Brad Hill

14. Here in the UK Wippit has operated a 'download for keeps' subscription service since 2001. Renting music isn't fun and we believe that you should be trusted to have control of your music collection.

With 60,000 MP3s to download at any one time thats a lot of iPods full of loud music. And we do this for only £50 / $89 a year.

Wippit is available internationally but is most well known in Britain. So if you don't mind, can you keep it to yourself? ;-)

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Wippit Press

15. Brad: Thanks for the reply. Thought so indeed. I agree an onboard EQ is probably a very good feature. I am not too keen on the need of FM radio (other than for listening to the TVs at the gym) but thats a personal preference. In any case, I got a large collection of music to categorize, so I guess I will be going for the mini, work on categorizing it for at least a year and then check later for whats available. I am sure I can give the "old" ipod as a gift to someone else afterwards ;)

Posted at 5:58AM on Dec 19th 2005 by hextor