European record shops face extinction. That was the blunt message from Steve Jobs, the founder of the Apple computer firm, who was speaking at this week's European launch of his company's iTunes online music shop - a service which, it hopes, will mean that nobody need darken the door of a HMV/Tower/Virgin ever again. Brian Boyd reports
The iTunes website boasts that it is the biggest (electronic) jukebox in the world - the site stores 700,000 songs. The US iTunes website has already sold 85 million songs in the last 12 months and the European version promises cut-price deals for consumers. Apple's goal is simple, according to Jobs: "One day all music will be delivered over the Internet."
This is the latest, and biggest, fight back against musical piracy - the free, but illegal, downloading of music from the Internet. The sheer scale of the piracy was potentially ruinous for the industry and a number of measures have been put in place over the last few years to discourage illegal downloading, including a tightening up of copyright legislation. Anyone within the EU who downloads music illegally now faces a potential prison sentence.
iTunes Europe's launch, with all its PR bells and whistles and aggressive commercial talk - "We will march this digital revolution throughout the world," said Jobs - focused on how user-friendly the service was. It is simple to operate: you go to the website, click on a song you're interested in, get a free 30-second preview of the track and, if you decide to buy, you just download the song on to your computer and "burn" it on to a blank CD. Alternatively, you can link your Apple iPod player up to the website and transfer the songs immediately.
ITunes Europe is available only in the UK, France and Germany for the moment. All other EU countries will be able to access the service from next October. With singles being sold for 79p (€1.20) and albums costing £7.99 (€12.10), many Irish customers will be interested in the service, but unless they have a credit card billing address in the UK, France or Germany they will have to wait a few months.
"I think everybody sees the power of the Internet for acquiring music," said Jobs. "You want something, and you get it. The problem has been that piracy has been the only real product out there, so people gravitated to it. But it takes about 15 minutes to download a pirated song and maybe you get the right song, maybe you don't".
The five major record labels - who have made all their acts available to users of the site - support iTunes but, crucially, a number of the bigger independent labels have withdrawn their bands from the service. For consumers, this means that music by acts such as The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Basement Jaxx and Dizzee Rascal will not be available. Negotiations between Apple and the independent labels broke down over the level of payments due to the bands. Also missing from iTunes are The Beatles - the band is currently involved in a legal dispute with the computer company over the use of the name "Apple" (which is also the name of The Beatles' record company).
In the US, iTunes now has a 70 per cent share of the legal Internet music market. In Europe, it is up against established legal digital competitors such as the newly legal Napster and Peter Gabriel's OD2 company. Apple has the financial clout to undercut its rivals, but whether it will still be offering €1.20 for a single and €12.10 for an album by the time the service becomes available in Ireland in October is a moot point.
The problem encountered thus far by Internet music companies is that the people who spend most on CDs are now aged 35 and over. This is the generation which grew up with a culture of buying records and a significant amount of this demographic simply can't or won't download and "burn". ITunes Europe, though, is moving beyond the traditional teenage market by providing more than 12,000 classical music tracks on its site, along with 5,000 audio books from authors such as John Grisham and Bill Bryson. A tie-in with AOL will also make classical music videos and DVDs available.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this week's launch was not that iTunes was talking up how easy and efficient its service was, compared to illegal downloading, but that the company really has the traditional record shop in its sights.
"Our goal is to get the music to people in a new way," said Jobs. "This online store is offering aggressive prices on every song." For a number of years now, the record shop has being told it was facing extinction. With music available on the Internet, people simply wouldn't need the shops anymore, ran the argument. Yet, while maybe not in the rudest of financial health, the record shops are still here while many an Internet music company has gone to the wall.
What people found was that downloading an album over the Internet was simply no substitute for visiting a record shop, browsing through the different categories and talking to members of staff about the quality of different albums. There's a special culture associated with buying music in a record shop which simply can't be replicated in an online environment.
Significantly, consumers have reported that what they prefer most about buying their music in a shop as opposed to on the Internet, is that they feel they are buying something "real" and tangible. There was a physical object, with a case and a cover and sleeve notes to read. Having a bunch of songs sent straight to your computer was a poor second, even if the price was slightly lower.
It's interesting to note that iTunes Europe is now providing a service where buyers can print off album covers to create their own "authentic-looking CDs".
Fighting on three fronts - against the pirates, its competitors in the digital music field and the record shops - iTunes Europe faces an interesting few months before it arrives in Ireland.