SPECIAL REPORT: The New Apple Music Store

I should have put it all together. There were the reports of Apple's new music service even before it's Monday announcement. Indeed, it seems that for the first time, Apple leaked like the Titanic in its final moments. But there were other clues to the scope of what Apple was doing. For instance, earlier this month, .Mac members got an e-mail from Apple letting us know that they had merged our .Mac and Apple ID usernames to make shopping easier on the site (see Apple Care Article ID: 86334). What a great idea, I thought. I didn't put it together with the music store rumors at all, or consider that Apple was consolidating everything so it could make one-click shopping easier in the music store. As for the store itself, as Dr. Dre said in a very Apple-friendly article on Fortune.com the day of the announcement: "Man, somebody finally got it right." It's been a long time coming. It's not perfect. It's only available in the U.S. -- for now. According to Apple, you have to back up your music regularly. If you lose everything in a catastrophic hard-disk crash, you can't re-download the music you bought without paying again (see Apple Car Article ID: 93033). Time to set up a new backup script in Retrospect. I was going to write this from the perspective of how good it's going to be for Apple, and how it could aid in the switch campaign and keep the company alive so we can keep getting new innovations from them. But ... I think this is bigger than just Apple. For so long, the music world has been in chains. I know a little about this, I'm a musician myself, although these days I don't get paid anymore (the real job thing kind of killed the fire that drove my college band). But I can tell you that one of the reasons I fell so much in love with my first Mac was because of the potential it made me see in technology and music. With my ancient Power Mac 7100 and a long-since abandoned and discontinued multi-track program called Vision DSP, I could make the kinds of recordings I had to pay thousands of dollars to make less than a decade ago. But, kind of like the Internet crash of 2000, the rest of the world hadn't caught up with the onward thrust of technology. When Napster came online and became popular, it immediately became obvious that the Internet and music should be best friends. But for years, the record companies had force-fed us what they thought we would want to listen to. Thousands, if not millions, of wonderful artists never got to be heard because they simply were never in the right place at the right time in their liftetime. The Internet would offer a better way, I thought. I told all of my friends that the revolution was underway. This was two years ago. But they closed down Napster. And rightly so. It was, after all, stealing. But there simply was no alternative available for online music. So the record companies tried to do it their own way. Pressplay, MusicNet, and others like Rhapsody. But all of these made you feel like a criminal (maybe out of spite for all of the illegal downloads you made?) when you used them. Rent music? Never in a million years. I'd rather break the law. And millions did. It's everyone's big dirty secret, even bigger than the porn sites surfed by millions in the middle of the night, or the spammers who make their money from clogging your inbox. You can literally look on the street -- especially at a college campus -- and point at nearly everyone you see and say: "There's a criminal. He's a criminal, too. And her, she's definitely a criminal." Another bright side? Sometimes Apple ticks us off, but if you look at the big picture, not really that often. And they're usually small things in the scheme of things. Charging for .Mac angered everyone, and wasn't necessarily Apple's brightest moment, but months later, I think most of us have forgotten about it and moved on. Apple is generally the most customer-responsive PC-maker there is. After being burned on .Mac, when it came time to charge for the iApps, at the last minute Stevie J. decided to keep most of them free and just charge for the whole package, which included iDVD. That was a a great move. Want a new iMac with a flat screen? Sure, no problem. And it's even more beautiful and impressive than any of us had dreamed. Now, with the music service, Apple has demonstrated that it's possible to institute a model that isn't user-hostile. I've already used the service, today as a matter of fact. I have to admit, it's kind of dangerous, since it's so easy to use. I spent $40 without breaking a sweat before I realized that I had to stop, or I wouldn't be able to eat. But there are a lot of cool things you can do without a spending a dime. QuickTime videos for some of the artists -- the complete videos in high-quality MPEG-4 encoding -- are integrated right into iTunes. Click the link, and it opens in the middle of your iTunes window. I don't think I've seen a better convergence of music, video and marketing potential since MTV went on the air. I want to get famous now just so I can be in the iTunes store.