Apple is holding its music/iTunes/iPod based press event tomorrow (1st September) and CNET is reporting from inside sources that the company will be making a change in the iTunes song sampling feature. 30 seconds sometimes are not enough to get the feel of a song as some feature long intros and by the time lyrics or the actual beat kicks in, your sampling time is over. Not any more.
From tomorrow, iTunes will let you sample a song for a full minute before buying, double the time it allows right now. This has been a demand for very long from users and Apple is reportedly ready to respond to its faithful fans. Apple declined to comment on the issue but it’s expected that when Steve Jobs takes the stage tomorrow, he is expected to make the announcement along with the other speculated goodies we’ve been predicting and waiting for.
This is not generosity or a special gift from Apple though; it’s just plain competition and its requirements. As CNET points out:
Numerous other digital-music services offer much more time, including Pandora and Google’s YouTube. Pandora has become a leader in digital radio, and while a user can’t pick and choose which songs they want to listen to, they do get to hear full-length songs free of charge. By contrast, YouTube users do choose which full-length songs they want to hear by picking whatever music video they want, but these songs can’t be legally captured or transferred to digital-music players.
While Apple offers the Genius Mix, a song recommendation engine, music consumers know that they can go elsewhere and be given more of a chance to try out a song. This could give YouTube and Pandora an advantage, as iTunes is not the starting point in the song-purchasing process. While Apple offers the Genius Mix, a song recommendation engine, music consumers know that they can go elsewhere and be given more of a chance to try out a song. This could give YouTube and Pandora an advantage, as iTunes is not the starting point in the song-purchasing process.
Apple is expected to launch the new iPod Touch in tomorrow’s event and the list of what else it could bring to the table is getting longer by the hour. Expect all sorts of news and more speculations in the coming hours which will only be laid to rest or confirmed once the press event starts rolling on Wednesday morning.
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