ITunes Store
The iTunes Music Store is a paid online music service run by Apple Computer, introduced on April 28, 2003 with iTunes 4.
The store made a deal with all of five major labels, BMG Music, EMI, Sony Music, Universal and Warner Bros. and covers 200,000 songs, including exclusive tracks from more than 20 artists suc as Bob Dylan, U2, Eminem, Sheryl Crow and Sting. Each song can be downloaded for 99 cents and comes with a 30 second preview. Albums are priced from 9.99 dollars to around 15 dollards. The user can burn songs to compact disc after download.
Songs are encoded by Dolby's Advanced Audio Codec, which is part of the MPEG-4 standard and QuickTime 6 and is usually considered superior to MP3 in terms of 128 kbps encoding mode.
As of April 2003, only Mac users living in the U.S. can buy songs with the service, but Steve Jobs announced plans to support both Windows and international users.
Fans and some executives in the music industry say that the Music Store has more attractive characterstics than previous services such as Rhapsody and MusicNet: it allows the user to legally download unlimited number of songs and transfer them to the iPod, and is comparatively simple and easy to use because it is closely integrated into the iPod and iTunes product lines.
Although seemless, subtle digital rights management (DRM) is integrated into iTunes, which manages songs purchased from iTunes Music Store. To convert protected files to MP3 format file, the user needs to burn CDs first then rip them without nearly no loss in quality of sounds.
The store sold about 275,000 tracks in the first few hours on the opening day.