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Apple's Song Remains the Same, But Could Get Longer

November 3, 2010 at 3:09 am PT

Apple appears ready for an extended play: It’s about to offer 90-second samples of songs for sale at its iTunes store, up from the industry-standard 30 seconds. Apple has been trying to offer the feature for months, and CNET says the company may still be negotiating with labels and publishers for the rights. But if the move helps sell more music, there’s no reason for the industry not to embrace it: Digital song sales have been stagnating.

Tagged with 30 second, 90 second, Apple, CNET, digital, entertainment, industry, Internet, iTunes, labels, MediaMemo, music, newsbyte, Peter Kafka, Publishers, rights, sales, samples, software, songs, Steve Jobs

comments so far. Add yours.

http://www.twitter.com/davidafenton DavidAFenton

This may help, but the return to the .99 cent sweetspot would help much more
http://twitter.com/swquantum Steve Waite

It’s a LaLa thing.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/ PKafka

I don’t understand. What does that mean?
Anonymous

Seems to me truly staggering that no-one reporting this story is observing one or other of the two likely plays behind this.

No-one can really believe this is about trying to sell a few more songs? The 30-sec clip is already curated to, as often as possible, be the song’s money hooks. So this is surely something else.

1) It will lead to proof-of-concept and system-performance data for a full streaming iTunes.

2) It is a bridgehead to forcing the labels to allow streaming content: the users will simply want the other half of the song in streaming format.

So I agree with the comment, it’s a LaLa thing: it’s about shifting to a Spotify-type iTunes.

Here in Europe (or the bits of it with Spotify – I am in the homeland, Sweden), it’s really common for people to note in passing, “usch, iTunes, hate it, haven’t even loaded it for music in ages”. Hi-bit rate streaming music is the consumer choice, on a subscription basis.

Millions of copies of a song sitting idle on hard-drives? Lame. Take it all to the cloud. Dynamic caching, offline material, peer-to-peer, as required. Music likes clouds too. Let’s get it on.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/ PKafka

Makes perfect sense to assume that 90-second streams are a way station on the road to full streaming of songs. And perhaps that’s true from a technical perspective. But from a biz dev/licensing perspective, it’s radically different — not apples and oranges but apples and elephants. Labels can agree to longer samples because they don’t need to rewrite their existing download agreements and business models. If they’re going to agree to let Apple stream all of their catalog, on demand, though, that’s a very different thing.