MP3 Winners and Losers for 2003

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Menta over at MP3newswire.net just posted his annual winners and losers list in digital music for last year. The big winner is Apple for dominating MP3 portable player sales and the dramatic success of its iTunes service. Napster savior Roxio and the small independent record labels also made the winners list. The losers list include SonicBlue and MP3.com. Interestingly, Ogg Vorbis made the losers list, not because of the codec per se, but because iTunes has both catapulted the AAC format to number two and stimulated Microsoft to pour more of its efforts ($$$) into WMA and the iTunes clones, leaving little room left for the open source alternative. The 2001 and 2002 winners list are worth a look too and each have links to that year's losers list."

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Re:MP3.com.co

[Rkane]

FuckedCompany.com [fuckedcompany.com] has a nice little blurp on it, as well as the letter [internalmemos.com] sent out to users. See the current mp3.com [mp3.com] homepage for a cheezy rendition of mp3.com's future.

disagree

[real_smiff]

MP3 was won.. long before WMA appeared. It offers transparency on all but a few special samples at around 200kbps, and with storage getting cheaper, slightly more efficient codecs (Ogg Vorbis, for example) don't offer enough of an advantage for most people to move. I won't touch WMA with a long barge pole.. just because you made the (mistake IMHO) of going over completely to it, doesn't mean anyone else has to. Go read some very informative discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org [hydrogenaudio.org] for specific technical reasons not to use WMA.. other than being from Microsoft etc. Of course, there is a danger that many people will use WMA just because MS make it easy for them to get into it... but why that's a reason to advocate WMA, i can't imagine. It's unlikely MP3 support will be dropped in hardware any time soon I think... i'd be more worried about your sound quality and portability of those WMA files.

Re:ITMS is the true winner

[timeOday]

I just wanted to say that the iTunes Music Store has reinvented how I view music.

Now when I want a piece of music, I have it, instantly. And with my iPod, I can listen to it wherever I go, with no worries!

That description also fits Napster ca 1998 perfectly!

Of course the player back then would have been a Rio for sure. In fact if you remember, Diamond pioneered the idea not only by releasing the product, but by fending off an RIAA lawsuit [wired.com] that challenged the legitimacy of such products! (Of course the iPod is DRM'd so maybe it doesn't really owe to this legacy).

IRiver

[Gyan]

The iHp-120 is a winner too and it plays Ogg.

Re:True to a point...

[elykyllek]

While they may not have RIAA label music on their sites both
Magnatune [magnatune.com]
and
Audio Lunchbox [audiolunchbox.com]
Provide drm-free ogg vorbis files for purchase.

Ogg Vorbis a loser?

[Asterax]

As I recall, someone developed a plugin [sourceforge.net] for Ogg Vorbis support in iTunes. Seemingly, the introduction of AAC should of done nothing to detour the popularity of .ogg. Of course WMA is a different story.

Re:Don't feed the trolls!

[AstroDrabb]

1) Ogg/Vorbis is supported by (obscure mp3 player). Why should I get that (*drool*) new, affordable iPod?

Yeah, your comment makes sense if you consider, all of these "obsure"

Neuros Digital Audio Computer [neurosaudio.com]
Rio Karma [digitalnetworksna.com]
iRiver iHP-100, iHP-115, iHP-120, iGP-100, iFP-3xxt, iFP-5xxt [iriver.com]
Kenwood's Music Keg [kenwoodusa.com]
And a bunch of others [xiph.org].
IMO, the Neuros [neurosaudio.com] is much better then the iPod. Is cheaper and the battery replacement is from $0 - $12 depending on if it is in warranty or not, which is much cheaper then Apple's $50 or so.

2) Ogg/Vorbis can work in a DRM-based business model! Here is how: Step 1: Get five candles and a live goat.

Umm, Ogg/Vorbis is an Open Source codec released under a BSD style license. You can wrap it in any proprietary DRM you want and save tons of money from not having to a) write your own codec or b) pay royalties to use someone elses.

Re:ITMS is the true winner

[be-fan]

The iPod is not DRM'ed for MP3s. And for AACs, I don't think its DRM'ed either, but rather, the DRM is in iTunes.

The iPod is just a firewire harddrive that plays whatever files it find in its iTunesDB. I don't really see how they could even do any DRM with that setup.

Re:True to a point...

[.com b4 .storm]

Though they over look all of the proprietary Apple formats that are attempts to lock comsumers into Apple. Quicktime, Apple's AAC, their restrictive iPod and iTunes, and just about every product they put out

Well to be fair, Quicktime and AAC are not proprietary formats. Quicktime is rather open, it's the individual codecs that may or may not be free/Free (such as Sorenson). You can stick pretty much any ol' video or audio stream in a Quicktime file that you like. AAC also is not proprietary to Apple, it is standardized by a number of key industry players. Whether or not that is much better is, of course, up for debate.

As for the iPod and iTunes, I'm not sure what you mean by 'restrictive'. The iPod lets you do pretty much anything you want, except you can't copy music back to a computer from it. It's a shame such a restriction is necessary to keep the RIAA somewhat happy, but it's not really a significant one IMO. And as for iTunes, what are these 'restrictions' that so upset you? I can play pretty much any music file or CD I wish, rip it, burn it, buy music, play it on any 3 computers I wish, burn it too, and so forth. Yes, I can barely breathe for all the restrictions in iTunes!

Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

[MichaelCrawford]

Many unsigned and independent artists provide free downloads of their music as a way to publicize themselves. I list many places to find them in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads [goingware.com].

For example, iRATE Radio [sourceforge.net] is a free (as in speech) downloader that fetches MP3s from websites that provide free, legal downloads. It uses collaborative filtering to learn your tastes and select songs based on the ratings of other users who like the same kind of music you do. iRATE's database of MP3 URLs has 46,000 tracks registered.

My article has a Creative Commons license. I urge you to copy and distribute it. In addition, I'm looking for help in translating it to languages other than english. The first such translation, to Romanian, was performed by an incredibly helpful fellow named Ciprian Mihet: Legaturi catre Zeci de Mii de Download-uri Legale de Muzica [goingware.com].

The article also discusses what you can do to make peer-to-peer filesharing of music legal [goingware.com]. That's a realistic possibility, considering that more Americans share files with p2p apps than voted for George Bush in the last election.

That's why I want to get every US p2p user to read my article before the upcoming US elections, in November of this year. I want copyright reform - meaning much more than just the repeal of the DMCA - to be a central issue in the upcoming election.

Re:True to a point...

[Daleks]

As for the iPod and iTunes, I'm not sure what you mean by 'restrictive'. The iPod lets you do pretty much anything you want, except you can't copy music back to a computer from it.

Yes you can.

bob@foo /Volumes/bob's iPod/iPod_Control/Music$ ls
F00 F01 F02 F03 F04 F05 F06 F07 F08 F09 F10 F11 F12 F13 F14 F15 F16 F17 F18 F19

All of the music files are contained within those directories. Copy away. It even works for DRM AAC's.

DRM with Ogg

[ArcRiley]

DRM is being used with Ogg. You must have missed this slashdot article [slashdot.org] back in April (no it wasn't an April Fools joke).

What's more, it's Free Software, dual licensed under the GPL or their "binary only" license. If you pay for it, part of it will even go to the EFF and Xiph foundations. Check out the OggS project page [sf.net].

Re:Ogg Vorbis a loser?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Seemingly, the introduction of AAC should of done nothing to detour the popularity of .ogg."

Here's the thing: I'm an iTunes user. It is a cool app, easy to use, I can rip a bunch of CDs pretty quickly when I set my CD preference to "Import Songs and Eject" so I can just feed a CD, it autolooks up the metadata, rips, kicks the CD, repeat. Neat stuff. I use AAC to rip, which has no DRM on its own -- DRM only comes into play when you buy songs through iTunes, not when you rip your own.

While iTunes can play Ogg Vorbis, it can't rip them. I could go find a Vorbis ripper for the Mac, but I'm lazy and uninformed on how to do this.

The other part of the equation is my iPod. It plays all the AAC files I ripped, but it won't play Vorbis, so even if I find away to rip Vorbis, set up iTunes to play Vorbis, I'm still screwed on the portable end of things.

AAC sounds better to me than MP3, and the files were smaller, so I switched to ripping in AAC.

Re:Once again, Apple fucks the OSS community.

[FunkyChild]

There isn't a version of QuickTime or iTunes for Linux and Open Source folk can't even build something compatible since these are closed source, proprietary, etc.

Yes, it's such a shame that nobody can build an open source, interoperable quicktime library [heroinewarrior.com]. Damn Apple and their closed, proprietary formats [apple.com]. *rolls eyes*

Re:Die, Vivendi Die

[flink]

If cable TV programming allowed you to just pay for what you want to watch, people could vote with their feet and it would be harder to screw them. But when it's an all-or-nothing service, you take what they give you.

Isn't that what "video on demmand" or whatever they call it in your area is supposed to do? Right now the selection is still kinda crappy, but even so, I find myself flipping to Comcast's on demand instead of wading through 300 channels of nothing.