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Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) marked the one-year anniversary of its iTunes Music Store Wednesday by upgrading its features, including adding song wish lists, lossless encoding, the ability to print out CD jewel-case inserts, and the ability to automate conversion of unprotected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files into Apple's AAC format.
To celebrate the occasion, Apple announced that iTMS customers will be able to download a free song every day for the next eight days from established artists such as Foo Fighters, Annie Lennox and Jane's Addiction. Moreover, iTMS will begin to offer a "Free Single of the Week" from emerging artists.
Apple also announced that, in its first year, iTMS customers downloaded more than 70 million songs. Presently, customers are buying about 2.7 million tracks per week. At this rate, they will have purchased a total of 140 million downloads by the service's second birthday.
Improving Functionality
Other new features include "iMix," which lets users publish playlists on the iTMS site for other users to grade, hear and buy; new music-video and movie-trailer sections; links from iTMS to a user's iTunes music library; and radio charts updated weekly from more than 1,200 radio stations across the United States.
Apple also raised the number of computers on which a downloaded iTMS file can be played to five, up from three. Perhaps as a tradeoff, the company lowered the number of times a playlist may be burned to CD from ten to seven.
Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox told MacNewsWorld that iTunes 4.5 and iTMS address areas where the Windows Media Player 9 series offered superior functionality for music aficionados. Along with lossless ripping of CDs, the new upgrades offer DJ features similar to those found in WMP Plus! Digital Media Edition.
At the same time, iTunes' ability to perform WMA-to-AAC conversion only when no copy protection is involved appears to be further confirmation that Apple is not interested in licensing WMA digital rights management (DRM) for either iTunes or the iPod music player, Wilcox said.
Windows Adoption
For his part, Adam Engst, publisher of Mac community newsletter TidBITS, said he would not expect iTunes to be able to break through the protection on those files to be able to convert them. "Apple would be opening itself up to lawsuits if it did," he told MacNewsWorld.
Engst also said he doubts this limited WMA compatibility will lure Windows users to iTunes because Apple competes in the marketplace with iTMS and iPod, not with iTunes.
"Windows users will use iTunes if they want to use the iTunes Music Store or an iPod," Engst said. "If they don't want to use the iTMS or an iPod, it seems fairly unlikely they'd bother to download and use iTunes, and Apple has little to gain even if they did."
Learning from Its Mistakes
Engst went on to say that iTMS not only has met his expectations, but also has changed the way he finds and buys music.
"Apple has taken a simple idea, bolstered it with an elegant implementation and made it even better over the last year," Engst said. "It has given me an enthusiasm for new music that I haven't had in years, thanks to the continued high price of CDs, unpredictability and general annoyance of commercial radio, and the loutish behavior of the RIAA."
For his part, Wilcox said Apple has come a long way in the digital music realm.
"Many people forget that Apple was late adding CD burners to its computers or releasing music software," he said. "But with iTunes, iPod and the iTunes Music Store, Apple has set the standard for other companies to follow. Maybe you can learn from your mistakes."
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