Contributed to by Rose Graner, Duncan Gregory, and Audrey McKenzie/La Vista
Entertainment Editors
Since its debut in 2003, Apple’s iTunes has managed to become the face of music retail and the standard by which an artist’s success can be measured.
Virtually the only well-known musical act to abstain from selling on iTunes is the Beatles, a group that is almost certainly more famous than iTunes itself.
However, the music of the Beatles was first released for sale on iTuneson Nov. 22. With that, one of the few remaining barriers between iTunes and monopolization of record sales was torn down.
As little as 30 years ago, independent music shops were common, and as a result, musical diversity thrived. Shop owners were able to pick and choose the recordings that they chose to sell based on personal taste or local interest.
The digitalization of music forced these independent shops out of business. The creation of convenient portable music players in combination with the power of music television produced a national understanding of a much wider range of artists than had existed previously. The music industry began to work on a positive feedback loop—popularity leads to publicity which leads to increased popularity, and so on.
Enter iTunes. Because the entire world seems to have adopted Apple’s iPods as the MP3 player of choice, iTunes is almost universally used. As such, it is regarded as a completely trustworthy and valid music source.
However, not all MP3 sales have to be made through iTunes. The amount of Beatles sales made since their debut on iTunes is obscene, but the same music has been available on many other digital music purchase sites for ages. There are other options out there. Amazon.com, in particular, often sells digital music at extremely low rates that go almost entirely unnoticed. (At one point, the entirety of Rihanna’s “Rated R” was available on Amazon for only $1.40).
Why doesn’t anyone take advantage of this? iTunes is trusted implicitly by most of its users. However, the plain fact is that it is a retail business.
Because it sells no physical material, the store makes a huge profit off its buyers. The music reviews on iTunes are almost always favorable because iTunes wants you to purchase those albums. Items that are only available on some countries’ iTunes stores are almost always available in a host of other places.
Consumers should begin looking outside the box in terms of music purchases. This isn’t simply because they can get better deals in other places, although the opportunity may arise. Music purveyors that don’t peddle the same product as iTunes are the last stronghold between consumers and complete auditory homogeneity.
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