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• October 17, 2003 •
Yesterday, Apple® launched the second generation of its revolutionary iTunes® Music Store for both Mac® and Windows users. The new iTunes Music Store offers Windows users the same online music store that Mac users love—with the same music catalog, the same personal use rights and the same 99 cents-per-song pricing. Since its launch six months ago, music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 13 million songs from the iTunes Music Store, making it the number one download music service in the world. With music from all five major music companies and over 200 independent music labels, the iTunes Music Store catalog is growing every day and will offer more than 400,000 songs by the end of October.
"The iTunes Music Store has revolutionized the way people legally buy music online, and now it's available to tens of millions more music lovers with iTunes for Windows," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "While our competitors haven't even come close to matching our first generation, we're already releasing the second generation of the iTunes Music Store for Mac and Windows."
The new Windows iTunes jukebox, compatible with Windows 2000 and Windows XP, has the same look and feel of the Mac version. It supports Apple's copy-protected Advanced Audio Coding format as well as MP3--but not Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs acknowledged that developing a product for the dominant Windows platform is unique for Apple, and started his introduction by pointing out an image with the words "Hell froze over", the same slogan used on the company Web site to introduce the Windows version of iTunes.
Apple also announced an online music alliance with America Online to provide instant, one-click registration to the iTunes Music Store for AOL's more than 25 million U.S. members starting later this quarter. America Online will integrate links to iTunes artists, albums and songs throughout its leading music site, AOL Music, which will give AOL members the option to link directly to the specific iTunes Music Store page to preview and buy music as they browse and read music news and reviews. Apple will offer selections of AOL's popular, original content such as Sessions@AOL and BroadBAND Rocks! through the iTunes Music Store.
Apple and Pepsi-Cola North America also announced a promotion to legally give away 100 million free songs to Mac and Windows PC users from Apple's iTunes Music Store. Beginning February 1, 100 million winning codes will be randomly seeded in 20 ounce and 1 liter bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist, and the winning codes will be redeemable for a free song from the iTunes Music Store. The Pepsi iTunes promotion will kick-off with a Super Bowl ad on February 1, 2004, and will run until March 31, 2004.
Windows Requirements
You can download your free copy of iTunes from the Apple Web site.
Right now, access to the music store is only available to US residents. Musicmatch and BuyMusic are offering their own jukebox to downloaded music, and Napster is said to launch later this month. Amazon.com, Dell, RealNetworks and Sony are all expected to provide their own music stores at a later date.
Most of those other services for Windows are distributing music in Microsoft's WMA format, which means that songs that are purchased from these can be played on any music device that supports Microsoft's WMA, (about 40 different portable devices) and played in most major MP3 software programs.
By contrast, songs that are purchased from Apple, wrapped in its proprietary FairPlay content protection technology, can be played only on the iPod and on any software player that supports Quicktime, Apple's audio and video format.
