It was the week the future finally arrived ... but will iTunes really

Sunday Herald, The, Jun 20, 2004 by Iain S Bruce

After eyeballing you intently for a few seconds, your front door recognises you and swings open, ushering you into a universe dedicated to your own personal comfort. The stripped floors, lighting and furniture look much the same as they have always done but do not be fooled, for this is a brave new world attuned to your every need, a state-of-the-art home devoted to personal delight where every song that ever got stuck in your head and every movie you ever wanted to see is waiting to immerse you at the flick of a switch.

It sounds like some fictional futuristic world, but this is no mere fantasy. This time the future is here already, and it arrived last week with the European launch of iTunes, Apple's online digital music store. This may be hard to accept for a generation reared on a diet of far-fetched predictions from television shows like Tomorrow's World that never came true, but with more than 100 million individual songs already downloaded by a ravenous market and global revenues of (pounds) 54m in the bag it seems that the high-tech tomorrow of our dreams has finally become today.

"It has been a long time coming, but the reality is that now anybody can go online, find practically every song ever written and download it instantly with a few clicks of the mouse,"said Jean-Paul Edwards of Manning Gottlieb OMD, who last week unveiled a fully- functioning living room designed to demonstrate the leading-edge technologies creeping into Britain's households. "The iTunes service is the kind of thing we could only dream about 10 years ago but what used to be science fiction is now science fact, and this is only the beginning of a process that will see the futuristic homes that previously existed only in our imaginations become a day-to-day reality.

"We are at a crossover point in history where the reality is far more exciting than the hype. Just as electricity and cars went from being rare novelties enjoyed by the privileged few to become something we all take for granted, now the space-age home is finally within everybody's reach."

Already a major success in America following its April 2003 launch, the iTunes concept is taking the world by storm. Comprising a vast database of tracks plucked from the music industry's extensive catalogues, it allows users to purchase complete albums in digital format for (pounds) 7.99 and individual songs at 79 pence a throw. However in America the charge is only 54p and it is only 65p in France and Germany. Regardless of where they are downloaded, these high-quality sounds can then be played on the customer's personal computer, transferred to MP3 players such as the iPod or stored on disk using a CD-burner.

With 500,000 tracks already downloaded legally in the UK this year, competition in the digital music business is heating up. Although iTunes remains head and shoulders above the rest, dominating an estimated 70% of the market, a host of rival services have emerged to fight for a piece of this lucrative business, with operations such as the recently unveiled Napster offering free personal MP3 players to anyone signing up for its (pounds) 65-a-year subscription service.

The iTunes revolution is not without its controversies, with the music business's major players expressing grave concerns over the ease with which songs in digital format can be illegally copied and distributed while many smaller record labels fear being cut out of the distribution loop. Such worries have proved irrelevant, however, the rise of legitimate services being a forced response to an accelerating download culture that saw millions of internet users swapping sounds online.

Tim Danton, editor of PC Pro magazine, said: "At first the music business tried to deal with the download revolution by simply pretending it wasn't happening and then they attempted to stop it with legal threats and a host of civil suits targeting the most active users. However, these moves barely dented the phenomenon because the fact of the matter is that people want the flexibility that digital formats bring and have clearly shown that if the industry won't meet their expectations, they are prepared to use illegal alternatives.

"This is consumer power at its most impressive and the lessons have not been lost on the rest of the entertainment business. They have seen the music industry lose millions in the process and now clearly understand that if they don't embrace digital delivery their competitors certainly will."

With an estimated 10 million personal digital music players already sold worldwide and enthusiasm steadily expanding, the commercial community now understands what the download generation wants and is moving quickly to meet those desires. It is a process that will eventually wreak its effects upon nearly every aspect of daily life, but currently the action is hottest in the entertainment industry, with the film and video business standing next in line for the digitisation process.

While the supplementary information on offer to digital viewers by clicking the red buttons on their remotes proliferate, satellite broadcaster BSkyB has roared into an early lead with the introduction of its Sky+ service, an advanced system which allows users to pause live television and automatically record favourite shows direct to a set-top box. Effectively enabling subscribers to cherry-pick the schedules and create their own personalised channel, it represents the cutting-edge of the movement to free television from the slavery of timetables and turn it into a medium that delivers what you want when you want it.