After all the excitement, speculation and US-envy, the iTunes Music Store arrived in Europe this week. Or at least, the bits of Europe called Germany, France and the UK. For people in these countries, Apple have arrived rather late to the party; since the US-only launch of the Music Store last year, European listeners have been able to use a variety of competing music download services, including Napster, WebListen and the eight services under the OD2 umbrella. Still, Apple may have an advantage in that their service has acquired something of an iconic status in this field, as well as being linked with iTunes itself, still a truly excellent piece of software.
Now, I’ve blogged my reactions to the Music Store before, but that was without the luxury of first-hand experience. Today I decided to give the UK ITMS a try.
Browsing the list of tracks and albums available, I’m not impressed. It’s like being in a small-town branch of HMV or Virgin… all the really obvious stuff you can get anywhere. However, those little record shops at least have the excuse of limited shelf space and dumbed-down marketing policies; download services have far more potential for low-bandwidth obscurities. Once again, I did a few test searches, including the usual “Frank Zappa”. There are no actual Zappa albums (making me wonder whether the Zappa Family Trust just isn’t licensing Frank’s music to Apple) but they do have Jean-Luc Ponty’s ‘King Kong’. Although I own every Zappa album, I don’t religiously collect other people’s renditions of Frank’s music; however, I’ve been meaning to listen to this album for years.
Prices at the UK Music Store are fixed at 79p per song and £7.99 per album. While this is better than the 99p/£9.99 rate foreseen by a number of commentators last year, it’s still more expensive than the US store… 99¢/$9.99 = 54p/£5.50 at the current exchange rate. Still, not a huge burden for the old credit card…
Even for a broadband connection with no other bandwidth challenges, the download seemed incredibly fast. Apple’s reluctance to state the actual bandwidth of the downloaded tracks on their website always worried me a little, and sure enough, my downloaded Jean-Luc Ponty tracks turn out to be 128k AAC files. Now, AAC is reputed to sound better than mp3 at equivalent bitrates (personally, I can’t hear any difference) but whatever the codec, 128k represents a huge loss of audio data from the 1411k wav/aiff source. What’s more, it’s not great value when you’re paying for the stuff, and sure enough, my downloaded tracks have that one-dimensional, unengaging sound of low-bitrate compressed audio. Surely a tiered 128k/256k system wouldn’t be too complex to set up?
It’s nice to hear the Ponty album at last, and I’ll now be trying extra hard to find the CD. However, this is driven not only by the great music, but also by the poor sound quality of the Apple downloads. I’ll end up paying double… if I choose to be a fussy audiophile anorak, that’s my problem, but it’s easy to see how the various legitimate download services could be construed as just another record industry ploy to fleece the consumer, under the guise of Exciting New Technology.