The iPhone Blog comes with a rather interesting observation. The rumour launched by Gizmodo that Apple is charging the big record labels $10,000 to create iTunes LP packages for them, and refusing to make the service available to the indies, has been refuted, more or less. Gizmodo based its story on a conversation with one such indie, who heard it from their labels digital distribution manager, who claims to have heard it from their iTunes rep.
When Apple announced iTunes LP, they didn’t announce the specific TuneKit implementation as an open format, and they surely didn’t announce an SDK. Also, important to know, they never did say they would be offering it to every artist immediately.
Conclusion from The iPhone Blog:
“It looks to us like this is just a case of Apple being Apple. iTunes LP is an experiment, clearly near-and-dear to them from Steve Jobs on down, and they’re starting with a few, select albums and trying to provide as premium and experience as possible. That kind of development work isn’t cheap, especially when you want to keep the numbers low at first, and it also means it isn’t open to everyone. Heck, it only even works on iTunes on your Windows or Mac PC at this point!”
It makes sense. So, knowing this, one could conclude that “Apple will open up iTunes LP and roll the format out wide, even to indies, because it will do what Apple really intends iTunes to do — help sell Apple hardware (iPods, iPhones, Apple TV and iTablet devices)”. For those that can’t wait to test it out, there’s ituneslp.net that helps you through the process… not officially of course.
October 13th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
These things are easy enough to create. Check out the Tuesday Spoils iTunes LP floating around to get an idea.
October 14th, 2009 at 8:51 am
[...] on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 (iTunes) Apple has announced yesterday that all allegations of charging US$ 10.000 for iTunes LP are completely bull. In fact it does not charge a production fee at all for iTunes LP. All the [...]