doodledee

Apple announced a new online music service yesterday. It must have been a big deal because Steve Jobs broke out his formal jeans and tennis shoes. Well, that and the fact that during the press conference, Dylan's 'The Times are a Changin' played in the background. Attention marketing geniuses: stop trying to be counter-culture, it's silly.

To supply the new service with music, Apple has partnered with the five largest music labels to put their stuff online. The library will start at 200,000 songs, which you can download for $0.99 each. If you download a whole album, you'll probably get a discount or something, too, who knows.

The music will be distributed in the MPEG-4 AAC format. Like MP3, AAC is a 'lossy' compression algorithm, but AAC provides a much better sound for a similar sized file. Apparently that's good. I'd still prefer a non-lossy format, but I don't know if that's gonna happen anytime soon. In the meantime, kids everywhere will get used to crappy sounding music. Suckas.

Another notable feature of AAC is that it has a bunch of fancy Digital Rights Management (DRM) stuff built into it. That may or may not be good. Depending on how it's used, DRM could start to infringe on your 'fair use' of the song. For example, initially with their service, Apple has chosen to limit the buyer to making only 10 copies of the song once it's downloaded. In the future, I could see things getting a lot crazier than that.

For now you can only download songs onto a Mac. A Windows version will be available within the next 8 months. It'll be interesting to see how this thing takes off. Like it or not, at least the industry is finally trying something.