Steve Jobs saves the Music Industry

The music service Jobs unveiled is a delight. Called the iTunes Music Store, the service -- it's available only on Apple machines for now but will be ready for Windows "by the end of the year" -- is fully integrated into the company's jukebox software. Users can search for songs to purchase in the same way they'd look for songs they already have on their machines. The system is foolproof: You type in a name, a song comes up, and you press a button to buy it. That's it. You're in the hole for 99 cents for each song you download ($10 for each album), but you see none of the transaction details; all the purchases are "one-click." And here's the stunning thing: Once you've bought a song, you own it. You can do (pretty much) whatever you want to do with the songs you download, including burning them to CDs, transferring them to iPods, or sending them to other Macs.

$0.99 a song, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it when you're done - legally! The system uses AAC rather than the popular MP3 format - and at the same event, Jobs announced new ipods (and upgrades for existing ones) to handle the new format. AAC allegedly provides higher quality in less space than MP3. Itunes 4 (with Quicktime 6.2) can encode to it for those wanting to take advantage. I've put off the purchase of an MP3 player, since I haven't been happy with the sound quality, but the combination of better quality, and cheap music may push me over the edge. The new ipod's come out Friday.