04/05/2007, 5:30pm, EDT
Thursday, April 5th
Apple igniting digital music standards war?
Apple's iPod and a slew of other portable media players support the AAC file format, which was developed by the MPEG group as the successor to the popular MP3 format. The adoption of unprotected AAC musical tracks means iTunes purchases will play on a wide variety of non-Apple portable players. Even Microsoft's Zune player supports the AAC format, alongside the Sony PlayStation Portable and several Sony Walkman-branded players. Other companies that produce players which support AAC include SanDisk, Creative Technology, Sharp, Palm, and RIMM.
As a result, online music stores such as Napster, Yahoo Music, MTV's URGE, and others that currently sell WMA songs which are protected by DRM may be forced to consider adopting DRM-free AAC tracks, making them compatible with Apple's iPod. Apple is well known for making most of its money from iPod sales, while the iTunes Store has operated at "above break-even" for the last two quarters.
"If more labels follow EMI's lead, and the other online music stores of the world are offered the same conditions on DRM-free music as Apple, Microsoft will have completely failed to corner the digital-music market, and by this time next year, there will be talk of it pulling the plug on its WMA-based efforts entirely," Hesseldahl said. "Or it will be forced by market forces to follow Apple's lead entirely rather than, as it has with the Zune and Zune Marketplace, copy it poorly."
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: digital music/video
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Advantage: Apple.
See, this is what makes Jobs a genius versus Gates (Ok he's a semi-genius) or the music industry suits (total morons). He saw that the iPod/iTunes closed system couldn't last forever, so instead of stubbornly defending it to the death with attorneys and ever more elaborate security, he anticipated future developments and changed and adapted.
Um, no, MS could not do that, unless apple was filled with such stupid lawyers they didn't stick the line in the license agreement saying they couldn't do such an obvious thing. (Or, if they did, then MS would be paying apple royalties to each license they get for WMA).
A DRM protected AAC format song pulled dwon from the Apple store typically doesn't play on anything but an iPod_
A DRM-free AAC format song pulled down from the Apple store will play on any digital audio player that supports the AAC codec_