Tag: apple

iPod Killer on the Loose?

yahoomusic

Tom Foremski over at ZDNet asks if Yahoo Music could become the iPod killer. He digs the way Yahoo Music lets you access a ton of music from all of your computers.

Like Tom, I grew weary of administering my CD collection years ago. I ripped all of my CDs to my music server back in the late nineties. Actually I did it twice. First just the “good songs” when hard drive space actually cost something and later all of the songs once it didn’t. And while my music server works great when I’m at home, it’s certainly true that I can’t (easily) access my music from the road (I can get song files using FolderShare if I really need to, but getting a file or two is not the same thing as having access to my entire library).

Tom likes the way Yahoo Music lets you explore for new music via its recommendation engine. Yeah, that’s pretty cool and all, but here’s a suggestion for Tom: go try Pandora. Fill in just one band you really like and you’ll discover more good new music than you thought existed. I have over 25,000 songs (all paid for; none stolen) on my music server and within 3 minutes of firing up Pandora I was hearing great music from artists I’d never heard of.

Tom also likes Yahoo Music because it’s not the dying on the vine, ad-infested over the air radio. I certainly agree with that. Between Pandora, MusicMatch (my service of choice, which is owned by Yahoo) and XM, I haven’t listened to a second of over the air radio in years.

I’ve never owned an iPod and I’ve never used iTunes. Both seem too proprietary for my open source tastes.

I guess my thing is that you have to do both. If you have an older and/or extensive music collection, the services are simply not going to have all of your music in their online libraries. Plus, I like to load my legally acquired, DRM-free MP3s onto CD-Rs or DVD-Rs to take on the road, and I’m just not willing to capitulate to the DRM extortions of the record label cartel. But I do like to listen to ad free radio and to access at least some music I enjoy on the road. So I have a networked music server at home and a MusicMatch subscription for the road.

That’s my recipe for musical happiness.

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CDs for IPods?

Here’s an interesting proposal. An independent music store in Charleston, SC is offering to trade an iPod for your CDs. For 45 CDs you get a 512 MB iPod and for 175 CDs you get a 60 GB iPod. Granted, the CDs have to meet some pretty reasonable criteria, but this in a novel program that is sure to get some takers. In fact, if I were in Charleston, I’d grab some from my storage boxes and head on over to collect my iPod.

The math can get troublesome when you think about how much you paid for those CDs- 175 CDs at $13 a pop is $2,275. But that’s a sunk cost since you can’t sell them for what you paid. The real question is how much you could sell them for on eBay and whether it’s worth the time and effort of doing so. Sell 175 CDs on eBay for $3 a piece and that’s $525. You can get a 60 GB iPod for less than that, but to sell them you have to add them to eBay, administer the auction and ship them (that’s a hassle, but not a deduction, since the buyer pays the shipping on most eBay auctions).

So would I rather sell them or trade them? For an average price of $3, I’d trade them and avoid all the work of selling them. For say $6 (for a total of $1,050) I’d probably sell them (but honestly it’s a close call because it would be a royal pain to have to box and ship 175 CDs individually).

So my conclusion is that this is a pretty fair offer.

On a related note, I wonder how many people will delete the songs they have ripped from these CDs before trading them in?

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