matador on itunes music store

[bcleland]

when did this happen?

[inactionman]

Hey yeah. No mention on the front page!?! Or are you waiting for the big announcement next Thursday when Apple release iTunes for Windows?

[bcleland]

I freaked out last night when I was searching for something else and gbv earthquake glue showed up for an alternative. As I searched on I found several other matador artist. The full catalog is not there yet, but who cares.
This is awesome, Thanks Matador. Keep em coming.

[Patrick]

Man, they beat us to it!

We'll have a full announcement later in the day.

For those of you who don't have Mac OS X, iTunes for Windows (and OS 9??) is coming very shortly...

Patrick

[Patrick]

Our official announcement is here:

http://www.matadorrecords.com/news

Only a selection of the catalog is up so far - we're furiously encoding and sending stuff to Apple, so keep checking back.

And yeah, it's iTunes 4/Mac OS X compatible only still. But there will be a Windows launch within the week, I believe.

Patrick

[Gerard]

just to clarify, there is a version of iTunes for Mac OS9, iTunes 2.0.4. However, said version doesn't feature access to the iTunes Music Store ; you'll need OS 10.2 and iTunes 4.0.1 for that.

iTunes 2.0.4 for OS9 :
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/9688

iTunes 4.0.1 for OSX
http://www.apple.com/itunes/

[mygrassisblue]

Well now that iTunes for windows has been announced and released, I think it's kind of offensive that it comes with a 128MB required 256MB recommended RAM spec. A little ridiculous. Oh, people without XP or 2000 are totally without option. Nothing like giving people MORE reasons to use the, ahem, free alternative sites.

[Gerard]

hey, you're talking about a memory intensive program. If the Windows version is as smooth to work with as the OSX version, I think the experience will compare favorably to any file sharing software you've tried. If not in terms of selection (getting better every week however) or price (ok,hard to compete with free) than certainly in terms of ease of use.

As far as needing XP or 2000, yes, that is a drag but Apple aren't the only folks writing new software that won't work with prior versions of Windows. And as mentioned earlier, though you can run iTunes 2 on Mac OS 9, you'd need to have OS 10.2 in order to run iTunes 4...operating systems have a limited shelf life. But if you're right in assuming there are enough people running earlier versions who are disenfranchised by this, that's certainly something for Apple to ponder.

[inactionman]

Why would Apple support anything below Windows 2000 when come this January Microsoft will no longer support Windows 98 or lower? Besides, the minimum requirements are pretty low. iTunes runs just fine on 900Mhz Duron with 128 Megs of RAM for me.

And look what's number 7 on the alternative chart. http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=2960788

20 albums in the top 100 for Matador. Hooray.

Now they just need to bring it to Canada.

[bitterfruit]

You can't seem to search by label or display a list of labels. I'd like to see K and Merge added to Itunes.

[Patrick]

Apple was not keen on highlighting labels, responding to consumer studies that said people were interested first in songs, then in artists, lastly in albums, and not in labels.

This applies very accurately to major labels, of course, but works poorly for us indies. If you want to send an email to Apple requesting a label search, it would be greatly appreciated by those of us who like think we represent quality!

Patrick

[inactionman]

I send the Search by Label request weekly, along with my iTMS Canada request. It's a huge pain to browse through all the junk just to find Matador artists.

[MusicMissionary]

I think it's great news that Matador and other indies are starting to get on iTunes. It makes me feel a bit better about where internet music is headed.

I'm curious though... How will the songs on iTunes differ from the mp3s already available on this site? Will Matador continue to have free mp3s? Will the iTunes songs be higher bitrate, a different selection?

[Gerard]

at present, we only put up a couple of free MP3's per album (for free). With iTunes, we're making the entire albums available --- and over time, we hope that most if not all of our catalog is available through the iTunes Music Store.

Other than that, there is one big difference. The downloads you purchase from the iTunes store are not MP3's. They are AAC (Advanced Audio Encoding) files, I believe with a bit rate of 128. They compare pretty well to MP3's in the 192-228kbs range.

The songs you purchase from Apple can be moved around from computer to computer with a maximum of 5 (I'm sure there is some workaround for this but don't ask me what it is). You can also transfer them to iPods or burn them onto CDR's. There are no restrictions on burning CD's featuring ITMS purchases with iTunes 4 other than any playlist that you burn can only be burned a maximum of 10 times (once again, there are ways around this, like changing the running order or creating a new playlist). I guess the idea is that you should be able have a CDR of the same songs you've already bought --- whether that's for the home stereo, the car, whatever.

There are no restrictions on what you do with the free Matador MP3's other than the obvious copyright infringement stuff.

for the time being, we will probably continue to make free MP3's available through our website in advance of new releases. Though now that we have a legal and easy-to-use way of selling the same tracks to you, we'll certainly be thinking about how long we leave them up and how many we will choose to archive.

GC

[Patrick]

Apple now say that they are considering adding a search-by-label feature - mainly in response to requests from the indie labels.

Patrick

[bcleland]

search by label would be way cool.

[bitterfruit]

Sharing files is limited to machines on the same subnet. So for instance only other people on the same immediately local network will be able to access files.