Apple offers iTunes goody bag

Apple Computer on Thursday announced plans to celebrate its iTunes Music Store by giving away songs and other prizes, as the service nears the 100 million download mark.

Apple will give away fifty 20GB iPods, one to the purchaser of each 100,000th song downloaded between 95 million and 100 million songs. The number of songs downloaded from the online music shop is expected to cross the 95 million mark this week.

The person who downloads the 100 millionth song will get a 17-inch PowerBook notebook, a 40GB iPod and a gift certificate for 10,000 iTunes songs.

The service, which launched about 14 months ago, clocked 70 million song downloads in one year. Though it did not bring in a lot of money for Apple, iTunes marked out a place for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company in the highly competitive music-download industry.

However, the road to success has not been without setbacks. For instance, Apple's music giveaway deal with Pepsi fell flat, dashing its hopes of covering 100 million music downloads within one year of the launch.

Meanwhile, Sony late Wednesday announced it will begin selling this fall two hard-drive music players that, combined with its new music-download service, are aimed at unseating Apple.

Sony don't stand a chance

they haven't even managed to get their heads out of the sand
yet.

[Doxxic]

No MP3

No MP3, no selling.

It's amazing how people stare at AAC, anti piracy technology and
the 'works only with iTunes' argument.

Coolness, ease of use, price and sound quality are important,
but the uttermost important criterium of new sound devices is
how many free MP3s they can hold.

[Llib Setag]

iPod Facts

High Fidelity
Designed to give you the best portable digital music experience ever, the iPod delivers the highest sound quality from input to output. iPod supports the most popular audio formats ? including MP3 (up to 320 kbps), MP3 Variable Bit Rate (VBR) and WAV ? giving you access to a wide range of audio file types. The new Apple Lossless format lets you import music from CDs at highest quality for about half the space as uncompressed audio (AIFF). And iPod is the only portable digital music player that supports the AAC format used by the iTunes Music Store for Mac and Windows. AAC features CD-quality audio in smaller file sizes than MP3, so that even more songs fit on your iPod.

See http://www.apple.com/ipod/ for the REAL information about iPod.

Most other player only play WMF files for MSOSXP.