10 Years of the ipod

edited March 2011 in General
A fascinating article in the Guardian yesterday http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/18/death-ipod-apple-music about the rise and fall of the ipod. The article argues that consumers are now moving on from the original ipod to devices such as ipod touch, iphone and ipod. But I found this paragraph particularly interesting
On iTunes in the US Apple would take 22 cents out of every 99-cent track sold, leaving just 67 cents for the labels to split between the artists, the publishers and themselves. A rather poorer return than those labels had been used to, selling albums for $18. Apple itself wasn't going to get rich on 22 cents a song. But it was going to sell a lot of iPods off the back of it. And the record companies get nothing from iPod sales. "The iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't," Schiller has admitted. (Despite the "Don't Steal Music" sticker attached to every new iPod, it makes little odds to Apple where the songs on its devices come from.)
It raises in my mind that if Apple are not really making much from digital music sales, can anyone, especially emusic? If this line of arguement is correct, then Amazon possibly use music downloads as a lead to selling other items on their sites.

The article continues
"The US market for digital music appears to be flat," says Enders. "It has flattened well before everyone, and certainly the music industry, hoped. At this point the real issue is that more than 75% of recorded music sales are still on CD." But that's of little concern to Apple.
A couple of other interesting quotes
With its iTunes Store Apple had succeeded in making the one-stop digital superstore that in-fighting and anti-trust competition laws had prevented the record labels from establishing for themselves. Instead, those labels had wasted a lot of time and money trying to set up subscription models: the idea that users would pay a monthly fee to access digital music as and when they liked
and
Sony, in particular, was hamstrung. On the one hand its hardware division wanted to push a Walkman that would compete with the iPod. On the other, its record label, Sony Music, accounted for the majority of its revenues and was unwilling to push forward with something they thought would be filled with illegally downloaded music. Paralysed, Sony allowed Apple to clean up on both the digital device and the songs to play on it.
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Comments

  • Amazon possibly use music downloads as a lead to selling other items on their sites.

    I use an affiliate link when tweeting my listens (don't worry, I haven't made enough to retire yet) and judging by my reports it would seem that MP3s are a loss leader for crockpots. Well, more likely that I bring people into an album page and they end up buying cookware.
  • And meanwhile, according to an article on Macworld (so maybe take it with some sea salt), the Zune is quietly being put to uh, rest.
  • Thanks. I enjoyed reading that article.
    My 2nd gen nano isn't holding a charge like it used to. I thought about getting a new one, but I don't like the current square nano with its tiny touch screen. I think I should wait until Sept when they come out with the new stuff.
    I'm not sure I'm done with a plain old ipod. Sure a touch would be fun, but they still cost too much to knock around while I'm working out or cleaning the house.
  • @Katrina - my ipod is a Classic 3G holds 30 GB of muisc, despite having over 90 GB on itunes. I've had it for about 5 years. Does me fine, as I'm not one of those who try to keep up with the latest technology. That is part of the issue. Teaching in a univesrsity I am amazed at the amount of the very latest technology some students have, but of course I m ancient! For me though, one of the most interesting aspects of the article was that if Apple make minimal profit from music sales, how can an organisation like emuisc make serious money with nothing else to back it up?
  • Yeah, I'm always amused by folks on the itunes forum complaining that there is no phone number to call for itunes problems on windows PCs. itunes is a free program, running on hardware apple didn't sell, and they expect free phone support? The whole setup is to sell ipods. You can only get apple support if you buy some Apple hardware. itunes store support is a joke. You can, however, attach as many ipods as your budget will allow to a single itunes installation ; )

    I don't think emusic is making money selling music, except on folks who don't download their monthly allotment.
  • Katrina, my 18yo daughter and her pals love the touch-screen Nano 'cause it's little and cute and has a touch screen. The commercials do a fantastic job of making it look cool.

    My 80G classic is running like a champ after, what, 4 years? Charge doesn't seem to last quite as long. I need to keep an eye open if they're rolling out new models this summer, as I want the biggest possible memory and I fear the current 160 G Classic will be discontinued, in these days of looming clouds.
  • I replaced my old 30 gig 4th gen at Christmas because of the battery charge issue. Got hooked up with the fantastic 160 gig classic. I'm so very happy.

    Craig
  • Mine still gets me through the day, so that's good enough for now. Just imagine, in the bad old Walkman days, having a battery that works day after day, year after year, that never needs replacing. And yet you start thinking it's on its way out because you're only getting 8 hours per charge, rather than 10 like you used to!

    Somewhere I read that iPod battery life is longer if you never let them run down, so I've generally charged mine every night, with good results. I also continue to use a 1st-gen Shuffle, which still goes a good 6-8 hours between charges. That was originally my daughter's...she's on her 3rd iPod, not because they have run down but because she wants more space.

    I will certainly get the 160G Classic eventually...especially if there's any hint that the next gen won't include a unit that size or larger. With video/movies, you would think (wouldn't you?) there would still be market for such capacity.
  • I've always been a shuffle person. I got my first gen-1 in 2005, then a gen-2 in case the first one died, which it did; not a battery life thing; one day it just wouldn't connect to the computer or charger anymore; so then a second gen-2, and just recently got a gen-4. I skipped over gen-3 with its annoying headphone controls; what would I do if the headphones died.

    I've always used them by running them all the way down, then recharging, and my 4 year old and 3 year old gen 2's still hold a 10-12 hour charge.

    I was very happy with my shuffles until just recently when Verizon picked up iphones and my wife got one. About a week later I had to get one too.

    I'm still trying to get out of shuffle mode (well not shuffle mode really because I never set it to shuffle) and used to having the ability to scroll through.

    Anybody want a like-new Gen-4 shuffle?
  • My battery issue was it started only holding a charge for 2-3 hours. That wasn't going to cut it.

    Craig
  • I found an iPod once. It was an older model, but still had like 60GB of storage. Tried using it off and one, but the battery was pure shite. Never knew if it would last all day or die before the end of a train ride. Sold it at a yard sale. That's the closest I'll ever come to owning an Apple product.

    As to the original point, until the music industry really strips down and gets rid of the requirement that 200 people get paid for every song d/l'd there isn't much hope for anyone to make decent money selling mp3s.
  • On iTunes in the US Apple would take 22 cents out of every 99-cent track sold, leaving just 67 cents for the labels to split between the artists, the publishers and themselves. A rather poorer return than those labels had been used to, selling albums for $18. Apple itself wasn't going to get rich on 22 cents a song. But it was going to sell a lot of iPods off the back of it. And the record companies get nothing from iPod sales. "The iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't," Schiller has admitted. (Despite the "Don't Steal Music" sticker attached to every new iPod, it makes little odds to Apple where the songs on its devices come from.)

    I find it hard to fathom that making 22 cents a song is unprofitable for Apple. According to this Apple has sold over 10 billion songs. At 22 cents a song that is $2.2 billion. While they do have expenses I can't imagine that the costs outweigh that kind of coin.

    BTW: I've never had an iPod... ok, well I did get some such thing given to me by my company as part of my 20 year anniversary gift. I promptly eBay'ed it. I don't use my MP3 player much but when I do I only have 1 brand/model/Style in my stash - The RCA eMuic 1. I had 25-30 of these at one time (down to 3 or so now)... picked them all up when Circuit City was clearing them out at $5.00 a pop a couple years ago (they came with a card for 180 eMusic downloads; 15 downloads/month for 12 months). Those were the days.
  • luddite, you amaze me. You had 30 of those things?

    No idea how long the ipod will hold out. It lasts maybe 4 hours if I don't rate anything or turn the screen on to look at lyrics, which lessens the joy : (
    It's died right in the middle of things. The battery is green and then shoots into the red all of a sudden. Bums me out. I didn't leave it in a hot car or anything.

    My husband has a 2G 2nd gen nano and 1st gen shuffle - he never uses either. They will do, in a pinch. The only way I like the shuffle is if I know what's on it. My main fun playlist I like has a mix of favorites and new stuff I haven't listened to yet. That one would drive me bonkers on the shuffle, I'd have to try and remember to rate things after it synced...and there's no way to tell what order htings were played in, since shuffles don't time stamp.

    Another reason I like my 2nd gen nano is the lanyard I have for it. It has built-in headphones. Of course it won't fit the new models. Although the newest touch nano has that cute little clip on it, like a shuffle.
  • The newest shuffle has a little button that you push and it tells you what's playing. With my old ones I always wrote lists on post-it notes (real, paper ones), now I take pictures of itunes with my iphone and then look at the pictures to see what I'm listening to on my shuffles. Probably I'm the only person in the world who would do that instead of just listening on the phone. Habits die hard, much to emu's benefit.
  • I am on my fourth iPod, the first was a 1Gig Nano, which i handed down to my daughter (who has packed it with Taylor Swift). Still works great, but then there are no real "moving parts." I had a 30Gb "Video" iPod, which I solf and bought a 5G 160. That last two years before the HD failed, but it had a hard life. My current 6G 160 is a year and a half old, but I really want a 250GB, if Apple would make it.

    I still have the 5G, and had considered upgrading it to 250GB, has anyone tried this hack?
  • I've often wondered about trying to upgrade the memory in my 30GB 5 year old ipod. I play it most often in my car with a direct lead so it gets charged there all the time, so the battery tends not to be a problem - when I'm in a train it'll last at least three hours or so no problem. Deep down I sometimes hope it will go so I can get another one! Problem is I'd like a much bigger memory, but I'd also like the apps on a ipod touch, and 64 GB isn't really enough. I don't use my phone enough to justify an iphone, although I do like the apps on it - my wife has one that I use when we're out together. I'll probably wait until there is a 120 GB ipod touch.
  • My hard drive went bad on my 2007 iPod Classic 80GB a few months ago. Replaced it with an iPod Touch and was surprised that the sync software lets you choose what albums and artists had to stay while the rest could come and go. Match that with some playlists including a recently added smart playlists, with web browsing, music streaming apps, and it's awesome.
  • I have a 6-7 year old 4G iPod mini I still use - admittedly it has never travelled - that I still use as my "Favorites" repository, mostly because it's full of CD rips that were subsequently wiped from the hard drive to make room for digital downloads. I finally broke down and got a 16G 4th gen nano for more generalized use and review of new downloads. I still use a stupid phone.
  • MrVMrV
    edited March 2011
    When I retired last year some of my staff gave me an iPod, I never would have purchased one, as I do not enjoy listening through headphones. That said, I now have it velcroed to the side of a kitchen cabinet and hooked up to a pair of klipsch speakers stuck sideways on the top of the cabinets. I couldn't be more pleased. If the battery goes dead in the middle of preparing a meal I just plug it into the wall charger. It also makes cleaning up a lot more enjoyable, especially with a glass of after dinner wine. Also, I seem to remember reading somewhere a few years ago that Apple never intended for iTunes to be profitable, it was started to create a market for iPods. Looks like they were successful.
  • @greg, fwiw, as mentioned on another thread, having got to the point of filling my 64GB of Touch, I have just come to the conclusion that my listening experience might actually be enhanced by putting less on it and cycling it more intelligently, basically because it is more likely to make me actually listen to what's there. On the model of trying to have everything on it just in case I want to listen to it, I found the result was that for well over half of that stuff it was functioning as a rather expensive USB storage device - it was kind of comforting to know it was there, but I was not actually playing it and complacent about it because it was always there. I have also once again realized (this happens periodically - ever since I was listening on a Palm with a 64MB - MB! - SD card - that the quest for enough space is never ending; if I had 120GB I could over-fill that already. I am going to see if not having albums on there all the time actually makes me pay attention to them when they cycle on. To early to be sure yet as I am still in the first flush of novelty with my new system.
  • This is why I like my shuffles - I have 4 gig of total space between 3 shuffles, and as I switch over to listening on my phone, I'm determined to keep 4 gig or under on that. I have a list on itunes, and whenever I get something new it goes to the front of the list. When I plug in an ipod, I go through what's on it, keep about half for another rotation, delete about a quarter, and put about a quarter back into the longer rotating list. That way I'm always giving things a few run throughs at a time. My constant battle is computer hard drive space free - I'm having a hard time keeping 5gig free on the computer lately.
  • Yeah. My 250G external drive has - wait for it - 278MB free and it's been down to 64MB free. The internal drive's a little better at 3.2G free, but only because I moved about 3G of nonessential stuff (mostly stuff I would eventually delete).
  • I totally see the point about computer hard drive space. Up until three years ago I had a computer with a 120GB hard drive, which now seems ridiculous, but when I bought it, it seemed massive! Then we added a 500GB additional hard drive. I moved photos, Office stuff and one or two other things, but left the muisc along with all the control stuff like Windows. It worked fine for a year, but then became really problematic as my music collection grew. I then moved all the emusic downloads, which didn't work - forunately I had a back up drive by then. Eventually the computer needed replacing as it was problematic in other ways, just operating so slowly. So Christmas 2009 we bought a new Dell with 1 TB memory - I paid extra to double the size of the hard disk, but well worth it. We are not quite half way full, so still some capacity, but I made sure I bought a model with plenty of potential to upgrade.
  • I saw a 1TB USB stick online the other day.

    it was kind of comforting to know it was there, but I was not actually playing it and complacent about it because it was always there
    Exactly the situation I found myself in w/ my U2 ipod classic. But that's OK, it can all stay there because I'm not as mobile with it as w/ the nano. I have a dumb playlist called "!gotta have it" that stays on the nano, and it's mostly the newest entire albums I've recently added. I like to listen to them all the way through. There are also a few fave songs in that list.

    The rest is all my ~Fresh Mix playlist that cycles new stuff in with stuff I haven't listened to, older favorites, blah blah blah, it's a good mix.
  • edited March 2011
    I like to listen to them all the way through.
    I'm the same. In fact I figured out recently that the only way that odd single tracks that I've downloaded have much of a chance of ever being listened to properly is if I compile them into imaginary albums. My latest tactic is to use memorable photos as a way of mentally tagging the albums...a while back I packaged a variety of uptempo electronica tracks together and got a great photo of a tree frog from from National Geographic's photos of the month for the cover art and called the album "Frog". Ever since then, I have known exactly where to find those tracks (much better than when I called them boring stuff like "Various Artists - Electronic Compilation 7") and the "album" has had a ton of listens.
    I find single tracks to be rather like pennies. For the most part I just throw them in a pot in the bedroom and they stay there and never actually get spent. It has to be at least a quarter to actually circulate as money.
  • My desktop at home has... 4 hard drives currently. The system drive is just 750Gigs - I barely even think about that one. Then there's the 1TB for user directories, 1TB for music, and 1.5TB for video. The music one needs to be upgraded to another 1TB or a 2TB soon. Additionally I have a 2TB external for live music, and another 2TB which I use to mirror some of the user and music directories to carry around with me.

    I'm thinking of just getting an 8 or 16 Gig card for my Droid and using that to transport music around more. There is definitely a need for pre-filtering in my life.
  • I remember long, long ago.....when I used to burn all my downloads onto CDs....I used to organize those single tracks into some kind of thematic grouping so the listening experience made some sense (yeah, I'm not a big shuffler). Since, aside from backup DVDs, the volume of digital music has long overwhelmed my capacity to put it all in hard form, those single tracks can readily become orphans unless they quickly make it onto some kind of Favorite playlist. Thanks to Album Pricing I get mostly albums anyway now, and I've been making an effort to burn my favorites of them, or single artist multis, so as to listen to them more often - on the real stereo.
  • I try to burn almost everything, using free tracks to fill up the space on CDs. If I let the CD play through, I'll hear all those tracks. Unfortunately, a big backlog developed during the Amie days that has never been adequately deal with, and I've purchased less popular music, making many of those free daily downloads unplayed. The back ends of those CDs more often have free netlabel fare on them.
  • Generally I buy albums now too. Otherwise it is occasional free tracks that I tend to put together as a playlist, although many just get played once unless I really like them. I stopped putting stuff on CDs when I realised a few years back that I was never actually playing them once I'd got an ipod, especially after I bought my first external hard drive so I had a back up that way.
  • True confessions time....I put the freebies in playlists or CDs and call them "Freebirds", like eMu Freebirds 12, in honor of the most popular shoutout at jam sessions or the gigs of of people you know. Amie I won't even contemplate organizing, especially since most of them have been consigned to the backup hard drive in the interests of free space - to download more.
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