But Apple *did* come late to the "real" online music business...

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Sun, 11/2/08, Jeffrey Watts <jeffrey.w.watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 11:18 PM, Leo Mauler
> <webgiant at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > But Apple did come late to the party,

> Oh come on, could you be any more ridiculous?

I could say the same about you.  You sat there claiming that in order to qualify as a "real" online music business, a business had to sign on all the major record labels, and now that I've pointed out that Rhapsody signed on all the major record labels 9 months before iTunes did, you're *moving the goalposts* and pretending that they were in their new positions the whole time.

> The online music market was tiny until Apple 
> built the industry.

Correction: until Rhapsody created an online music industry with the music catalogs of all five of the biggest record labels.  Apple merely added its own online business to the existing online music industry created by Rhapsody.

As for "tiny", Apple's iTunes service launch in April 2003 had 200,000 tracks from all five major record labels, but prior to iTunes Rhapsody had 175,000 tracks and 14,000 albums from the same five major record labels.  There was no "giant increase" in the online music market (an increase from 175,000 to 200,000 is only 12.5%), as Apple merely offered the *same* music catalogs that Rhapsody had already offered for nine months.

> Just because some small companies 

Correction: a big company.  Signing on all five major record companies made Rhapsody a big company.

> had streaming music services beforehand 

Rhapsody let you download and burn CDs of some of its content as well, just like Apple *eventually* did with iTunes in April 2003.  It wasn't just streaming music.

> doesn't mean that there was a multi-billion 
> dollar industry there.  Hell, I'd be suprised 
> if it were multi-million.  

As of October 14, 2002 (six months before the creation of iTunes), the online music industry *was* a multi-million dollar industry:

http://tinyurl.com/businessweek2002
"Commentary: Digital Media: Don't Clamp Down Too Hard"
OCTOBER 14, 2002

"Online music, for example, could pull the industry out of its slump, growing from $15 million to $540 million, or 5% of sales, by 2005, estimates Forrester Research Inc."

$15 million *is* multi-million.  Apple may have helped make it a multi-*billion* dollar industry, but Apple arrived late to a thriving multi-*million* dollar online music industry.

> Apple built the online music market. Period.

Rhapsody created the "real" online music market, and brought it up to a multi-million dollar music business by October of 2002.  Period.

Apple just added their own version onto an *existing*  multi-million dollar online music industry, and eventually turned it into a multi-billion dollar online music industry.  But they didn't create the online music industry, they merely built onto an existing multi-million dollar online music industry *foundation*, put there for Apple by Rhapsody.

Personally I'm a little confused here about your behavior in the face of my behavior.  My own example of occasionally failing to accurately verify what I'm saying before I type it (specifically my own unverified and eventually proven untrue claim about the listening comparison of different iTunes AAC files) should have given you a good reason to verify your own claims about the history of the online music industry before typing them.  Yet you plunged in and furiously typed without engaging in a good, sensible RTFM about the history of the online music industry.

Let this be a lesson to both of us: it is better to *verify* one's claims that one's opponent is uninformed rather than to blaze away and be revealed to be the true uninformed one ourselves.

In that wisdom lies the true road to "being taken seriously."