This is sure to bring in the little guys who need a hand to get into the music industry.

Brad Smith

I just wish everyone in all areas of consumer products could offer the innovation of Apple!

no, but you may be the only shareholder who spells "owns" o-n-e-s.

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

i guess you think computers, servers, software + osx, itunes, quicktime + codec (H.264), firewire (IEEE 1394), ipods & iphones aren't products.

What happens to iTunes when AAPL has no content to sell. Like it or not AAPL is a distributor here with no content of its own.

according to the SEC Form 4 (05.05.06), JOBS STEVEN P is the largest shareholder in DISNEY (DIS) with 138,000,007 shares. a little company you might have heard of that just owns one of the largest content libraries + ABC, A&E, ESPN, Walt DIsney Pictures, Touchstone, Pixar, & Miramax.

other content that doesn't involve the networks or studios are podcasts & audio books which have been making consistent gains as content for ipods year after year.

Jobs may want to learn some partnering skills – they’ll come in handy when AAPL inevitably stumbles and needs the revenues.

partnering skills maybe, or you could just control the company.

AAPL S&P stock report 12.01.07

5 yr return on $10k = $235,123

with The Daily Show, CBS & Southpark shows online & free via their own sites coupled with Netflix for full season DVD rentals of most popular shows, who is really going to pay the $4-5 zucker thinks people will pay for content? jobs rightly objected to zucker's idea of content bundling. that is to sell bundled shows at a higher price. the OFFICE is a popular download, so bundle it with that boxoffice turd EVAN ALMIGHTY just because they both shows star steve carell. it's a stupid idea & jobs knew it. what consistently kills other content startups is confusing pricing scemes (napster) and proprietary or cumbersome codecs/encoding or hardware agendas (sony connect). sony connect ranked 23rd before finally shutting down.

apple designs the whole experience to work seamlessly at a great price – from the codec, to the store, to the player. do you really think having a hodgepodge of several different companies, each controlling their segment from encoding to market to player would be a better solution? it has been tried too often & always fails because of the separate greed of each of the components.

This is not television, where switching your distribution channel is a button on the remote, and switching back is pushing another button.

This is a software application – people learn it, customize it, tweak it, and become comfortable with how it interacts. They become proficient and like the flow of it. They become adept at using it quickly, and it stops being a program for putting media on their device and starts being an integrated tool in their daily computer use.

Apple has done a supreme job at tying a device to an application – most of the consumer base has no idea you can use anything BUT iTunes with your iPod, and even if they could, why would they want to? Apple mastered the market on the intuitive interface long ago, and so far nobody is touching them. Look at the iPhone… years of producing phones from companies like Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, etc… and in walks Apple at the last minute with hands-down the cleanest, most seamless phone OS ever built. They tip-toed in on the ROKR and realized there was no way a partnership would work because the other player was too dumb to listen, so they would go it alone. Result? By far the most hyped and demanded cellular phone ever created. Others can only WISH they could pull that off on their second go at a cell phone.

Thus far, Apple has managed to find ways to stave off the juggernaut (M$) and actually grow market share. Not easy for a company with less than 10% to start with. On the flipside, NBC, a company who has only consistently LOST market share, shows that it fully intends to continue that loss. I would wager that the current users of iTunes are also the users most probable of paying for content – and NBC just walked away from the lot of them to bet on who? People who would defect from iTunes for NBC Content, iTunes haters, and Pirates.

Good luck with that strategy NBC, if you want to know how it will turn out, give me a call on my iPhone after it gets done syncing with my iTunes.