Section 4.1. Welcome to the Music Store | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

4.1. Welcome to the Music Store

The iTunes Music Store has the backing (and the song catalogs) of five big music companies, plus an increasing number of independent ones. Its inventory contains more than 1.5 million songs from major-label artists like Bob Dylan, U2, Missy Elliott, Jewel, Sting, and hundreds of other musicians in a range of popular styles like Rock, Pop, R & B, Jazz, Folk, Rap, Latin, Classical, and moreand the collection grows by thousands of songs a week. You can also browse, sample, or buy any of 11,000 audiobooks from Audible.com.

You can also find thousands of podcasts (Section 2.3) free of charge in the Store, as well as music videos and digital booklets of liner notes that come with some albums.

Tip: To see what songs have been added recently, click the Just Added link at the left side of the main Music Store page.Farther down the page, you can also see and hear what famous people are listening to in the store's Celebrity Playlist section. It never hurts to know what Wynton Marsalis and Kevin Bacon are listening to these days.

You can browse the virtual CD racks from the comfort of your own computer, listen to a sample 30 seconds free from any track in the store, and download desired songs for 99 cents each with a click of the mouse. There are no monthly fees. And your digitally protected downloads don't go poof ! into the ether if you decide to cancel your subscription, as they do with certain rival services. All your downloaded songs go right into iTunes, where they are just a sync away from your iPod's traveling music collection.

You can play the downloaded songs on up to five different iTunes 4equipped Macs or PCs (in any combination), burn them onto an unlimited number of CDs, and download them to as many iPods as you like. Thousands of people use the Music Store every day, in fact, without even realizing that the songs are copy protected.

Apple's success with the iTunes Music Storeover 500 million downloads by mid-2005caught its rivals' attention. These days, Apple's imitators in the dollar-a-song biz include Napster 2.0, Yahoo, Microsoft, Sony, and even Wal-Mart. (Remember, though, that music from these services come in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format, which won't work on the iPod. Except Sony's music service, which uses its own proprietary file formatbut that doesn't play on the iPod, either.)

Figure 4-1. The Browse button and Search box in the iTunes window perform their song-locating duties on the Store's inventory. Each listing in the Choose Genre pop-up menu has its own set of pages.
Below it, you can see a lot of the latest Music Store bells and whistles: movie trailers , radio charts , etc. The Store itself is now available in more than 15 countries , including Canada and members of the European Union.

In the summer of 2004, Real Networks announced that the songs on its own Rhapsody music-download service were now iPod- playable , meaning that the company somehow reverse-engineered Apple's song file format. Apple wasted no time in announcing that (a) it was furious, and (b) it would simply change the iPod's software so that songs from non-Apple music stores would once again stop working.