ITunes Store
The iTunes Music Store is a paid online music service run by Apple, introduced on April 28, 2003 with iTunes 4. It is available only in the United States.
The store made a deal with all of five major labels, BMG Music, EMI, Sony Music, Universal and Warner Bros. and covers 200,000 songs. Each song can be downloaded for 99 cents and comes with a 30 second preview. There is no subscription fee. The user can burn songs to compact disc after download. Songs are encoded by Dolby's Advanced Audio Codec, which is part of MPEG-4 technology and QuickTime 6 and is usually considered superior to MP3 in terms of 128 kbps encoding mode.
To buy a song, the user needs to use iTunes and therefore only mac user can buy songs as of April 2003. To pay the fee, the user needs to have an Apple ID on the Apple store, which implies the user needs a credit card with a U.S. billing address. On the day the music service was introduced, Jobs said it would be available in Windows and for international users as well until the end of 2003.
The impact of this service has been known quite little. Many expers and users say it can be a groundbreaking service since the death of Napster. Unlike other previously struggling services, iTunes Music Store has more attractive characterstics; it allows the user to burn unlimited number of songs and transfer them to the iPod.
