It happened with Napster, then Apple Music, now streaming services
There is no widespread file sharing in the general public, instead we have devices that we don’t own, and streaming subscriptions
Apple didn’t just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it — it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to acquire the rights to the content
I’m not saying what’s right or wrong, just saying that this comment has very little understanding of these battles
Considering that buying 'licensed' copies of Hollywood movies and Billboard chart music is possible in maybe 10-20% of the world, I can guarantee that pirated consumption (bootleg CD-Rs and DVDs, but also 'alternative' streaming sites) outnumbers 'licensed' sales for most successful films. And it's 'licensed', as opposed to 'legal', because a large proportion of the world doesn't really care about American copyright.
I've was never willing to riot over Napster - this is different.
This is one of the substantial jumps, I refuse to be cut out of this innovation.
Seriously, use Bing, try your free Photos built in generation system, they are rolling out GPT built into Word. Microsoft is easily the advanced tech company right now, as far what services can be provided to a consumer at scale. This is still like the alpha phase of all this. Apparently I talk to Copilot soon - that levels that up so much and it's already the best assistant I've ever had.
This is equivalent to trying to keep us all off smartphones and stuck on dumb phones I guess - I think you get what mean.
The NYT decided for all of us, the new smartphone equivalent thing is bad and we can't have it... that is something I'll riot over.
Just now I asked Copilot why my keyboard RGB lights were turned off every time I opened a game, that's almost verbatim - it told me exactly where to go and exactly what to turn off, took about 10 seconds to entirely search and correct the problem.
> Apple didn’t just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it — it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to acquire the rights to the content
I recaly iPod being a hard drive that I could connect to a computer and just copy music directly to.
Pretty sure it was never like that, it was always gated by iTunes.
It was an integrated system, not an open one.
Definitely is today. It's difficult to copy mp3 files directly to an iPhone and play them. Even from a Mac, but even more so from a PC or Linux.
I bet less than 1% of iPhone and iPad users do that. They mostly pay for streaming. (Again, not saying that's better, but just that the general public doesn't do Napster-like file sharing.)
> Pretty sure it was never like that, it was always gated by iTunes.
Then you need to recalibrate your certainty assessment. Not only did I do this personally with both music and videos, it is incredibly easy to find documentation of the steps. First google result: https://www.alphr.com/add-music-to-ipod-without-itunes/
Apple's ipod sales absolutely benefited significantly from music piracy. Especially early on when nobody hard large itunes collections yet and music torrents were much more common.
The genius of the ipod / itunes play is that they got to do both. They benefited from the demand from people with non-itunes libraries, while also offering a low friction sales platform that was easier than piracy.
I guess I'll just say "meh" -- it doesn't negate the main point, which is that Apple spent a lot of money and time to acquire rights, and they have a music store.
It is gated by iTunes, just not 100%
I know some people side load stuff on devices -- there's no device where that's impossible.
I bought an iPod Mini in '04 that I used for a summer photography course as an external hard drive. An actual external hard drive would have been cheaper, but after my summer trip was over and I no longer needed the additional storage space — hey, I had an iPod Mini! I copied photos onto it from a CF card via USB. It was literally drag and drop. There was no iTunes gating. You're just... wrong here.
The ipod was launched two years before the itunes store. Even after the itunes store launched, you could just still load your other music into itunes if you wanted. All music was sideloaded (i.e
transfered directly over USB) onto ipods at this point
You don't seem to know any of this history and are just making things up. I don't think Apple had to pay any money for the right to sell music via the iTunes store. What they did do was add DRM to music sold through the store, at least until they were big enough to renegotiate in 2009.
It happened with Napster, then Apple Music, now streaming services
There is no widespread file sharing in the general public, instead we have devices that we don’t own, and streaming subscriptions
Apple didn’t just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it — it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to acquire the rights to the content
I’m not saying what’s right or wrong, just saying that this comment has very little understanding of these battles