How iTunes Could Improve With Competition

iTunes is the most widely used music service in North America and probably the world. The service has a 80% market share with it's iTunes store. The iTunes store is growing and will soon throw competitors off the racks of shelves. The question is: Why hasn't anyone challenged it?

The iTunes Store has a scot free almost no competition streak. The only competitors are Napster and Rhapsody which are only music not like the all in one iTunes Store package. iTunes has been hard to beat with Apple's power and the fact that they have okay quality music for a reasonable price. The only times a competitor would improve is because of competition like the situation in Canada where wireless carriers are fighting for customers like there's no tomorrow with Bell, Telus and Rogers yanking their throats with unbelievable deals not seen before. Now lets look at iTunes. Previously it offered low quality music at the same price, but that changed thanks to BitTorrent. The site OiNK's Pink Palace used to offer high quality music in all formats at the highest bit rates in each format. When it got shut down, iTunes quickly increased the bitrate of their music and made it DRM free.

That doesn't explain why a new company shouldn't take the crown away. What's shocking is that iTunes hasn't changed much over the years that is worth noticing. Ever since OiNK it's stayed the same. iTunes needs a new competitor,but it's not getting one. I believe a new service can work out the things companies won't do so they can maximize profits. Now, I'm sounding all Mao Zedong-ish but lets think about the people for a second. If we don't give them what they want won't there be rebellion. If something legal like OiNK started, then there wouldn't be such thing, would there. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was a member and said at the time of closure "I admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made Oink a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could imagine, it was there, and it was in the format you wanted. If Oink cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now." He criticized services like iTunes for being poor and low-quality.

The question is when will we see change. Not so likely. I want to lead that change. Nothing in this world is perfect, but we can make it close enough to call it perfect.

iPiracy - The World May Actually Need It

I am planning to launch a site on internet piracy or iPiracy for short. Here I will talk about how internet piracy is good in some ways. An example is OiNKs Pink Palace.

OiNK was created a few years ago as a music only torrent site. The site was private and had high quality music songs of every format you could imagine from MP3 to OGG. The songs were also in higher quality than what you could get at iTunes at the time. This marked a shift as people proved that they weren't going to pay for something with poor quality and DRM with it as well. OiNK eventually grew and grew until the US government came in. They shut it down, but all was not lost. iTunes eventually increased their music quality, but didn't have every format you could ever think of, nope that is something Apple didn't do.

Another one was the Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay was the worlds largest torrent site with the most members and torrents indexed compared to other torrent trackers. The Pirate Bay got into trouble recently. They shut down their tracker and their founders and funder were sent to jail for intellectual property infringement aka copyright infringement. Nothing came out though from this.

What makes me mad is that why don't we stop iPiracy by making things better and cheaper. I mean if we did it with cars how come we can't do it with piracy. Some people do it because they don't want to pay, but some people do it because the stuff they can buy is not worth their money. Would you want a lower version for 99 cents or a higher quality for a dollar. It's your choice.

I believe in paying, but that doesn't mean people can abuse that. I believe that if piracy were to be gone, you would need to make the things people download cheaper or more worth their buck then right now where internet piracy is going up, not down.