Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard

stivi writes "BusinessWeek has up an article about a war: a standards war in the online music business. Apple's recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher's catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod's AAC format as the industry standard. The article talks about possible reasons why AAC might marginalize WMA, as well as deals with some of the implications of drm-free aac-standardized industry. 'Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become iPod compatible, and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.'"

MP3

[hokiejimbo]

What exactly makes this different than .mp3? Other online music stores have had the option to sell unrestricted .mp3 files for plenty of time and still haven't decided to do that. Yes, AAC is arguably better than MP3, but both are quite "iPod compatible".

Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[e4g4]

AAC isn't everywhere yet, I'll agree. However, if Apple actually moves it's entire catalog to unprotected AAC files, it seems to me quite reasonable that the vast majority of players released from that point forward will support AAC, considering Apple's dominance in the online music sales market. If one sells music player hardware, wouldn't you want it to support the most popular format (for sale) on the market? Especially considering AAC doesn't require royalty payments.

Perfect Timing

[ObligatoryUserName]

Lucent's recent assertion to MP3 patent rights ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/technology/23pat ent.html?ex=1329973200&en=6a3c7d2b220acec5&ei=5124 &partner=digg&exprod=digg [nytimes.com] ) combined with this move by Apple and EMI probably have doomed MP3 to an also-ran status.

If you're not familiar, everyone who licensed the MP3 patents is now being threatened with a lawsuit by Alcatel-Lucent because they co-own the patent rights, but weren't party to all the licensing that was going on before.

Re:Why not MP3?

[Llywelyn]

First, MP3 is embroiled in multiple licensing and patent issues that make it legally more murky than AAC. Second, as you point out, AAC is superior technically to mp3 while still being an open standard. It has a standardized tagging system, is better at lower bitrates, more channels, etc. All of which make it significantly more desirable than mp3 from the standpoint of a content provider, as well as from our standpoint as consumers.

Oh, and stop using betamax as a comparison point. Please, just stop it. Betamax lost the format war more because of bad marketing, licensing, and format confusion than because of lockin. Even to the degree that it could be path dependency, such is not a relevant comparison point here since AAC is already a widely adopted standard (not as widely as mp3, I'll grant, but I'll ask one simple question: what percentage of players in the hands of consumers can play AAC? Considering that it includes the iPod, the Zune, the PSP, and a great many phones its probably quite high).

Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[IvanTheNotSoBad]

You're right about the chip support, and about the state of affairs now, but the article refers to what may happen. The fact is, Apple is making an extremely good argument for adopting AAC (DRM free music). This is A BIG DEAL!

I personally never even thought of purchasing music from iTunes until the deal with EMI was announced. Now, I'm looking forward to it. This is what a lot of people have asked for, and now we have started on the road to get there.

Also worth mentioning:

• AAC achieves much higher sound quality than mp3 at the same bitrate.
• AAC does not require loyalty payments, MP3 does
• AAC supports 48 channels...mp3 supports a 6 (5.1 at MPG2)

This is a short list. Check out the full list of features here [wikipedia.org]

BTW, I'm not an apple fanboy. My entire music collection is now in MP3 and I'm not looking forward to re-ripping my music.

Re:May not make much difference

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The OEMs who make generic MP3/WMA players are not likely to pick up a new chip to decode AAC files unless there is high demand for it, because it will noticably affect cost.

Do you have a source to back that up or is it just a guess on your part. AAC is part of the mpeg standard and a lot of chipsets have support for that. I'd be interested to know if chips that support AAC are significantly more expensive than ones that don't.

With disk space being relatively cheap, the size difference of a MP3 file ripped in alt-preset-standard or alt-preset-extreme versus the size of a similar bitrate file in another format is less of an issue.

A lot of people can't fit their collection on their player and if the standard quality of files goes up to match Apple's offering, that effect will double. Also, it is not just disk space that is an issue. File size affects the cost of bandwidth to deliver the songs, which can add up for an online store and it affects how quickly users can download the songs, which might be a differentiator for a market that is such a commodity.

AAC is a good format, but its another "standard" in a crowded field of compressed music file formats.

If I were an MP3 player manufacturer, here is how I would look at it: the number one online store for music has been closed to me thus far, but it is just now opening up and becoming a resource I can capitalize on to sell players... if I support AAC with my player. 75% of current portable player owners (which make up most of the new purchaser market) currently have iPods. If they're looking at alternatives to the iPod and I can make a move to my player easier than a move to a different competitor's player by supporting the format they're already using, that may be a very big win for me.

Obviously each manufacturer will have to do a cost/value analysis for themselves to see if it makes sense, but I suspect players that support AAC are about to go from Apple and MS, to almost everyone within a few iterations. A week ago creative had basically no motivation to support AAC. Today, it may be a move they can't afford not to make.

Re:aac is not in EVERY hardware player

[Anonymous Coward]

>>True... but iPods do currently make up something like 75%-80% of the market all by themselves.

Depends how you split the market. Other sources state 14% of the market [litux.org] for iPods. Think how many cheap-and-cheerfull mp3 players are sold on ebay each day. You can bet they aren't included in any of these figures.

Re:MP3

[peragrin]

AAC is MP4.

So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.

the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.

MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.

Re:MP3

[rucs_hack]

The only advantage I can see is that you can bookmark within an AAC file. For me that's a pretty major point.

Here's what's killing WMA

[Nom du Keyboard]

might marginalize WMA

What is marginalizing WMA is new releases of WMP that break backwards compatability with older files. See here for a music publisher [theregister.co.uk] where Microsoft WMP 11 broke their sales model.

Further ..

[ackthpt]

Microsoft would like their format to become dominate, but hopefully that will not happen because an open format like AAC is better for everyone.

This further underscores why Microsoft should stop fixating on the music/video business and turn their attention back to their core business.

Re:MP3

[cayenne8]

"AAC is not an Apple-only format. Apple just uses it as the default format for iTunes/iPod. Many mp3 players (both portable and software players) play AAC including the venerable Winamp and it *could* be considered the next-gen mp3 due to it's built-in error correction and more robust features (namely more channels and sampling rates). "

And, unlike mp3, AAC can be taken all the way up to lossless in quality. If they'd sell that to me w/o DRM, I'd be fighting my way to the front of the line to buy music from them.

I don't care if it is FLAC or AAC-lossless, but, if they'd just take the ONE more step to go that far, I'd be happy to do business with them. And since the iPod can already play AAC-lossless...they could easily go for it.

Re:MP3

[dgatwood]

In my mind, the premium is really for the higher bit rate (256 kbps instead of 128 kbps). The DRM-free status is more of a free perk.

Re:MP3

[DDLKermit007]

Really the whole AAC thing getting added to players has been going strong for a while already. Oddly enough it's happening in many new cellphones now that are supporting AAC (look at any cellphone Samsung makes now or really any that come out of Japan). Which makes you wonder how lazy audio player manufacturers are getting when the cellphone industry is doing something very uncharacteristically open that they have yet to do.

Re:check the boxes

[wass]

That makes me wonder something, though. Trans-encoding between different lossy encodings obviously worsens the sound quality, but what do you know about re-encoding a lossy file at a lower bit-rate within the same codec?

Ie, if you rip a CD track to a 256 kbs AAC and re-encode it as 128 kbs AAC, how bad would that sound compared to a direct rip of CD into 128 kbs AAC?

Bullshit.

[SEE]

Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing

Really? So when is Apple going to stop dicking around with Harmony [wikipedia.org] compatibility?

Re:Apple is just a MSFT wannabe?

[dangitman]

Part of what drives iTunes sales is that it's the only online store that can supply music to your iPod

No, people use the iTunes store because it's a really good store that works well. The other stores suck - they are horrible to use.

Therefore, if everyone starts selling DRM-free AACs, it's unlikely to drive more business to iTunes.

I think it will. Seeing as the other stores suck - people who use other players can now start buying their songs from iTunes, rather than just ripping from CD as they do now. After all, nobody uses the other online stores, even though they do support the other players.