Ordinary Gweilo

Buy an iPod? No, not me, they’re over-priced and not really that much better than any other MP3 player. That was my view, so about a year ago I bought a small Creative MP3 player. Nothing much wrong with it, but it’s not exactly user-friendly.

So now I have an iPod Nano. The GUI is user-friendly, and iTunes is easy-to-use. The problems so far are that if I am half way through listening to a podcast when I synchronize it disappears (because it thinks I have listened to it), and it ‘freezes up’ a bit too often for my liking (though it does make a full recovery after a reset). Apart from that it’s very good. I think I am convinced,

However, the iTunes Music Store is STILL not available in Hong Kong, which means that I’m still looking for somewhere legal to download music. The latest possibility is eMusic – the plus point is that there’s no copy protection, the negatives are that they don’t have deals with the major labels (so their selection is quite limited – even more so for Hong Kong residents), the previews are far too brief and you have to subscribe for a set number of downloads each month. So far, I’m struggling to find enough songs to download to justify the monthly fee.

I think they could help by making the site easier to navigate (such as allowing you to view all tracks by an artist rather than forcing you to select an album first), having a track rating system (enabling them to make better recommendations), and (ideally) offer full previews rather than limiting them to 30 seconds. Actually, I think what I really want is Musicmatch, but that isn’t available in Hong Kong.    

On the subject of iTunes, it was reported recently that sales at the iTunes Music Store were down by 65%:

Forrester said it got its figures by analysing 2,791 US iTunes debit and credit card purchases conducted by members of its consumer panel.

While overall US sales at the iTunes Music Store were down 65%, the number of monthly transactions had declined 58%, while the average size per purchase had fallen 17%, Forrester said.

Except that Forrestor now say that their report was misunderstood by Reuters, and reading the summary on their website this does seem to be the case. The report led to a fall in Apple’s share price, which is even weirder when you consider that their profits mainly come from selling iPods, not selling music.  Apple say the report is wrong, but have not elaborated any further, and probably have no need to do so because the point of the Music Store is to boost sales of iPods (which they do announce, and which are still going up).

And still no news of the iTunes Music Store coming to Hong Kong.