December 2004
Members: Rockin Moms Showcase
Rockin Moms will have a showcase at the Camp Betty Campout festival,
which celebrates the music, arts and creativity of women. The dates for
the festival are July 22- 25th 2005 in Northern California (Eureka).
The festival is open to all ages and will include children's
activities. If you would like to submit for the showcase you must fill
out the performer application at www.campbettycampout.com and send
along with your press kit, tech and performance riders and desired fee
for performance to:
Rockin' Moms Showcase at Camp Betty Campout
P.O. Box 320988
Los Gatos, CA 95032
I will also take electronic submissions but you must include the Camp
Betty application form to apply. Deadline to apply is January 15th
2005. Email to Submit@rockinmoms.com with "Camp Betty Showcase" in the
subject line.
Note: You must also submit your artist/band for inclusion on
Rockin'Moms website (this can be done at the same time.)
For more information about Rockin' Moms visit www.rockinmoms.com
For more information about The Camp Betty Campout visit
www.campbettycampout.com
The Year of the iPod: 2004 in Review
By Christopher Breen
If anything characterized the world of digital music in 2004, it was
Apple’s iPod. Although a slew of music players and online music marts
were unveiled by entities other than Apple, no “iPod killer” or music
service gained significant traction. By the end of the year, the word
“iPod” had become nearly a generic term for a digital music player,
much as Walkman described portable music players 20 years earlier. And
as the iTunes Music Store extended its reach across the globe, similar
services did their best to scratch out a living from Apple’s leavings.
Here are this year's stories.
The iPod in Miniature
As competition in the online music and digital music player industry
began to heat up in the waning months of 2003, it became clear that if
Apple wanted to maintain its edge, it had to offer a less expensive
iPod to compete with flash-memory-based players. It revealed its
intention to do so in at January 2004’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco,
when Steve Jobs announced the $249 iPod mini—a smaller version of the
iPod that came in five colors (gold, silver, blue, green, and pink),
sported a new click wheel controller, and carried a 4GB hard drive.
iPod mini family
As with the original 5GB iPod, many people were taken aback by the
price of the iPod mini. Few considered $249 to be inexpensive, and if
you were going to spend that kind of money, why not pungle up an
additional $50 for an iPod with 3.7 times the storage of the mini? (On
the day of the iPod mini announcement, Apple bumped up the storage
capacity of the $299 iPod to 15GB.)
The Impact: Pundits be damned, the iPod mini sold like hotcakes. Sales
clearly demonstrated that consumers couldn’t care less that you could
buy far more music storage for a little more money or that they could
have the same storage from a less expensive player such as Creative’s
MuVo 2. People wanted the iPod mini because it was cool and were
willing to pay the price to bask in that reflected coolness.
Talkin’ ’Bout My Fourth-Generation
Fourth-generation iPodWhen Apple announced the fourth-generation iPod
on July 19, 2004, it could have done so by proclaiming that the
“maxi-mini” was born. The fourth-generation iPod was, in some ways,
closer in design to the iPod mini than it was to the previous three
generations of white iPods. Available in 20 and 40GB configurations
priced at $299 and $399, respectively, the fourth-generation iPod bore
the same kind of click-wheel controller used on the mini. And like the
mini, it could be charged via USB 2.0.
Apple offered more hard drive capacity for less money on these iPods.
To help make this possible, Apple made the previously bundled case and
remote control optional (though a dock was included with the 40GB
fourth-generation iPod).
The Impact: The fourth-generation iPod was an evolutionary upgrade
rather than revolutionary. It didn’t offer the FM tuner or line-in
recording of other music players and no one much seemed to mind. Few
cared that a case and remote control failed to appear in the box—most
people purchased third-party cases anyway and it’s the rare iPod owner
who invites greater cable clutter by mixing in a remote control.
Putting the HP in iPod
On January 8, 2004, HP and Apple announced that HP would sell
HP-branded iPods supplied by Apple. On September 15, 2004, HP released
its first iPods—models identical to Apple’s 20 and 40GB
fourth-generation iPods, save for the HP logo etched in the back.
The Impact: Apple didn’t need a partner to sell iPods—it was doing very
nicely on its own. In order to extend the reach of the iTunes Music
Store (and, thus, sell more iPods) it did want iTunes bundled with as
many Windows PCs as possible. Allowing a major PC vendor such as HP to
put its name on a product as popular as the iPod gave Apple that
opportunity.
Under a Blood Red Click Wheel
Apple called a press event for October 26, 2004. The invitation read
“Steve Jobs, Bono and The Edge invite you to attend a special event.”
The event began with the unveiling of the iPod Photo, the first iPod to
feature a color display. Bearing either a 40 or 60GB hard drive (priced
at $499 and $599 respectively), these iPods could be configured to
display their pictures on a television with the assistance of an
included audio/visual cable or via an S-video cable strung between a
television and the iPod’s included dock. They also featured greater
battery life than previous iPods, letting you play music continuously
for over 15 hours on a single battery charge.
U2 at iPod eventTwo members of the band U2 were on hand to endorse the
first product to bear the group's name—the iPod Special Edition: U2.
Though functionally no different than a 20GB fourth-generation iPod,
this special player was the first “big” iPod to come in
colors—specifically a black face with red click wheel. Along with a
coupon for $50 off of U2’s entire 400-plus song catalog from Apple’s
iTunes Music Store (normally priced at $149), this special iPod also
carried the signatures of the four U2 members etched on the back plate.
The Impact: Steve Jobs made it clear that Apple felt video was the
wrong direction for portable players like the iPod. Photos, on the
other hand, made sense. Apple lost a portion of the iPod photos
potential customers when it was revealed that a computer was necessary
for the iPod photo to display pictures—you couldn’t directly download
pictures from a digital camera and then view those pictures on the
iPod. Given this unmet expectation and the iPod photos’ price it wasn’t
the kind of runaway success as was the iPod mini.
A portion of U2’s fans were unhappy that the Boys From the Emerald Isle
had appeared to have sold out to The Man by endorsing a product. The
Man, on the other hand, was more than happy to be enveloped in U2’s
hipness.
Sony Fails to Deliver the Goods
If there was one company that had a chance to slow Apple’s ascendancy,
it was Sony. The company had been in the music business for years,
owned its own record label, controlled a major portion of the home
entertainment market, and delivered attractive and well-designed
products. In the summer of 2004 Sony introduced its first hard-drive
based music player, the Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1, a player that played files
encoded only in Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format.
The Impact: The inability for this and other Sony players to play the
most popular audio format on the planet—MP3—spelled curtains for Sony
as a significant entity in 2004’s digital player market. In a case of
“too little, too late” Sony announced late in 2004 that it would make
its players natively compatible with MP3 files.
Joining the Chorus
Everybody and his brother jumped into the online music marketing game
in 2004—Microsoft, Virgin, Real Networks, Napster, MusicMatch, Sony…
even Wal-Mart. The various services attempt to distinguish themselves
by claiming that because they support Microsoft’s WMA format (a format
supported by nearly all music players not made by Apple), they offer
consumers greater choice.
Likewise, every company capable of surrounding a circuit board in
plastic pumps out a digital music player. Many such players are
promoted “iPod killers” by the press yet, once released, are found
lacking in comparison to the iPod.
The Impact: Virtually none in 2004. These emporia and players do little
to dent the iPod and iTunes Music Store’s dominance.
Harmonic Convergence
Hoping to ride Apple's coattails, RealNetworks released Harmony, a
Digital Rights Management (DRM) translation system, that allows music
purchased from RealNetworks' RealPlayer Music Store to play on the
iPod. Taking umbrage at its DRM being unraveled by Real's engineers,
Apple branded Harmony as the “tactics… of a hacker” and vowed to fight
Harmony by means both legal and technological. Real posted a petition
asking users for their comments.
The Impact: Real pulled the petition shortly after it was posted as the
bulk of the comments chided the company for actions many considered
unethical. Apple delivered on at least one of its threats by making the
iPod photo incompatible with files processed by Harmony. It took a full
month after the iPod photo’s release for anyone to notice.
iTunes Without Borders
Wildly successful in the U.S., Apple worked out the licensing issues
necessary to take the iTunes Music Store abroad. In June, the store
opened in the UK, France, and Germany. The store came to Austria,
Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal
and Spain in late October. And Canada finally got its version of the
iTunes Music Store in the first days of December.
The Impact: Canadians can now focus their ire on the ongoing hockey
strike.
Charity Begins at Home
The British press held Apple in little regard when it was revealed that
the iTunes Music Store would not sell the remake of “Do They Know It’s
Christmas?”—the proceeds from which would go to charity—because Apple
was unwilling to change the store’s pricing structure (the charity
asked that retailers sell the song for twice the price of a normal
single). Apple later said it would sell the single but would do so by
charging the usual price of 79 pence and donating an additional 70
pence from its corporate pocket. Representatives from other online
music merchants were not happy.
The Impact: More money went to charity, more people were exposed to the
iTunes Music Store, Apple earned greater wrath from its competitors,
and Steve Jobs appears to give not a tinker’s damn what those rivals
think. |
