Apple's claim to fame is the iPod, a music player which isn't different from any other but which, thanks to the Net, viral marketing and mindless mainstream media adoration, has become the Sony Walkman of the first part of the 21st century.
iTunes is to the iPod what film used to be to cameras. You couldn't have one without the other. Then digital cameras came along and film is on its way out. And when the Big Four Organized Music cartel members finally release their full catalogues and reduce their ridiculous wholesale prices, as they must, sooner or later, iTunes will instantly become passé.
Established and amateur artists of all ilks are using the Net to tell the world about themselves and their work while the major labels, which have been in total control for so long, struggle in vain to keep up, and keep hold of what they used to have. But eventually, they'll have to do something they've never had to do before.
Compete.
And this in turn means they'll be dragged kicking and screaming to the open market place.
The Net decrees it.
They may, or they may not, remain at the top of the heap. Time will tell.
But now, they won't be alone.
People are queasy In a what at first appears to be a fulsome paen to Apple and the iPod, "The free file-swapping sites that started with Napster (which the courts shut down) and continued with Limewire and the various Bit-torrent [sic] sites, are still seeing plenty of pirate traffic, but a growing number of people are queasy about that," writes Alan Kohler in Australia's The Age.
"Also, the free files are often mangled and it is hard to find what you want. As the iPods/digital music phenomenon goes mainstream, so legitimate sales of digital entertainment via the internet are booming as well.
"With iPods and iTunes, Steve Jobs and his team at Apple have created a beautifully functional closed system for selling and consuming digital music and video that looks to be heading for total dominance."
Far from being queasy, every day more and more people are opening new Net accounts and logging on to the p2p networks, thanks to Warner Music, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal and EMI whose attempts to stifle file sharing and p2p have in fact publicized them to the world at large.
Kohl says, "legitimate sales of digital entertainment via the internet are booming".
By that, he presumably means corporate sales, but as p2pnet posted in January, "Echoing hollowly would be a more accurate phrase, and that's entirely due to the fact the Big Four - Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI – are sticking to their physical 1970s business model in the digital 21st century."
Not only is the corporate online music buisiness not booming, it doesn't yet even exist.
Making no impression To all reasonable intents and purposes, iTunes is the only corporate music service out there. And it isn't even a service. It's a 100% restricted, wholly owned, single-purpose, self-funding loading application for iPods.
The only genuine sales applications such as the seriously troubled Napster #2 are making no impression whatever on the huge independent online music scene which dominates the music world.
Kohler's "Closed system" is the way Steve Jobs likes it. But it won't last. Events in France mean there's a strong likelihood Jobs' DRM C.R.A.P. will go down the iTubes, and even if there's a reprieve, where France leads, others countries - the new market places - will surely follow.
The Net is still growing and literally billions of people have yet to sign up to go online.
All the attention is currently on Apple, but there are many, many other vested interests also vying to gain complete control of what people hear, see and do, and the means by which they do it.
The corporate entertainment and software cartels hope to stop the rot: stop people from having freedom of choice and freedom of expression. But it's already far too late. Blogs and citizen news sites reporting, untrammelled by corporate self-interest, are telling it like it really is.
Corporations such as Google have read the writing on the wall and with Google to the fore, will try to create their own rigidly controlled internets.
But they're too late as well.
Meanwhile, although iPod has captured most of the market, other multi-functional devices which allow their users to play music, show video, make phone calls, send text messages and surf the web, are arriving. Fast.
And unlike the iPod, they're not, in and of themselves, $400 DRM money machines.
Parallel universes "The shock troops for Microsoft's victory over Apple in personal computers in the 1980s were Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Toshiba and so on - that is the chip manufacturer and the cheap PC makers that licensed the Windows operating system," Kohler adds.
"With digital music and video it will be Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson - the mobile phone manufacturers.
"This year they will start releasing phones with the same storage as iPods - up to 30 gigabytes. iPods themselves will have to become phones.
"Microsoft's software will power the new generation of phone/music players, and the business of selling digital songs and TV shows will open up. Google will probably run the most popular online store, but there will be thousands.
"The iPod/iTunes system will move into a niche with Macintosh computers because Steve Jobs has again stuck with closed architecture and total control. This will happen quickly because mobile phones are being turned over about every year.
"It is quite a thrilling time to be alive.
"We will witness the creation and destruction of a market dominance in the time it used to take to work up a business plan."
We will indeed.
And immediately alongside them, a truly independent parallel universe populated by creators who aren't driven by pathalogical addictions to more of what they already have.
In one universe, cash 'consumers' will continue to mindlessly consume, spending their money on cookie-cutter product churned out endlessly by the corporate entertainment and software cartels.
In the other, 'customers' will exercise free choice, using open source applications or buying from independent innovators, all the while listening to music and watching films made by genuine vcreators.
No need to stay tuned.
Jon Newton -
Also See: The Age - Apple tunes in to world domination, April 1, 2006 C.R.A.P. - Apple and its C.R.A.P., March 4, 2006 logging on - Alberto Gonzales' school horror show, March 31, 2006 Echoing hollowly - IFPI file sharing report, January 19, 2006 down the iTubes - Apple: foiled in France, March 28, 2006
