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How does Apple do it? Apparently they paid some of the journalists to come and witness Steve unveil the European iTMS. But whatever they did, it's unusually efficient. Any conceivable news medium I consumed in the past days – including the mainstream ones reported about iTMS. And looking at the profits Apple makes with this, the number of songs they sold or its market share of the music market, it's not a big thing today. Still, everybody pays attention. And, as journalists put it, unlike most other stores, iTMS is the one that actually has people awaiting its opening.
Mainstream news on the topic in Spiegel Online, sueddeutsche.de interviewing Steve (not much new there), Die Zeit, Tagesschau and so on.
I tried making iMixes. My main critique here is the limited choice of iTMS Europe and the fact that my mixes will be crippled because of that, despite some of the dropped songs being available at iTMS / US. Enjoy remains of Waster, six tracks, without its namesake song (original, 22 tracks) and Music by Numbers, ten tracks down from 72 in the original. Why not give me high ratings for my destroyed compilations. I might become famous.
While trying this out, I learned that iTunes will choke when trying to upload an iMix where tracks cannot be found in the local lirbary. I blame lazy programmers. Oh – and the URLs are crap aswell.
Elswhere: