When one
first uses an online service that boasts a 1/2 million or more songs, one thing
they may expect is to be able to find pretty much any song that comes to
mind. However even with iTunes having a library of 1.5 million
tracks, this only accounts for 1/6 to 1/5 of all commercially sold music in the
US since the 1950's. This becomes an issue for the music industry who want
consumers to change from unofficial P2P sources to legal alternatives as some
users will resort back to file sharing networks if they cannot get their song
from a legitimate source. If you copy, please show your
appreciation by linking back to cdfreaks.
Then again, it appears that the record labels would prefer
more music to be available on download services, however there are many bands
that refuse to make some or all of their music available online. These include the Beatles, Dave Matthews Band, Madonna, Garth Brooks and many others. One of the main reasons has been that some artists will only allow full albums to be sold, where as most music download services including iTunes require that albums can be sold by the track also. However, when it comes to new releases, the record labels insist on rights to allow online sales for all artist contracts. With older releases, it is quite difficult for the recording industry to get the rights to make music available online as some songs can be held under 5 to 6 different copyright, each containing its own copyright restrictions.
In total, there are around 1/2 million unique commercially released CD titles, which amounts to around 5 million tracks, along with a further million or so 'out of print' former commercial releases. As no physical music store could stock this quantity of CDs, it would be possible to make all this music available through online download services. Unfortunately, if customers cannot find what they want on music download services, it will prevent music services, labels and artists from moving head as consumers will move to alternative services, which includes P2P networks.
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Then go to Apple's iTunes Music Store or one of its rivals, such as Napster, Rhapsody or this week's newly launched Yahoo Music Unlimited. Start searching, and you almost certainly won't find everything on your list. ITunes boasts of leading the pack with a catalog of 1.5 million music tracks, while the others offer from 500,000 to 1 million. This sounds like a lot, but iTunes only offers about one-fifth to one-sixth of all the music sold commercially in the United States during the past 50 years. That's an urgent problem for the recording industry, which desperately wants to pull people away from pirate services such as Kazaa, eDonkey and BitTorrent that illegally offer much bigger libraries. If piracy doesn't stop, the recording industry could implode. Read the full article here. |
One common complaint besides DRM restrictions I hear quite often about music services is the inability to find certain music. However, there is likely a wide range of other music that is available on iTunes that may have never sold a single copy. Hopefully over time, the majority of all commercial CD releases will be available as digital downloads from online music shops. When iTunes first launched, they had a library of around 200,000 tracks, so their music library has increased a substantial amount since then. If you copy this cdfreaks article, please credit us by linking back to cdfreaks.
On the other hand, even if iTunes and other music services
did offer all commercially released music, there are still many
reasons why some would still resort to CDs. These include better sound quality, having physical media, no DRM restrictions (non-crippled discs) and no compatibility issues.
Source: Kentucky.com - Technology
