Site traffic analysis service Hitwise reported iTunes Web site traffic was 4 times as great December 25th as it was the same day a year ago. The massive traffic increase caused slowdowns of 20 minutes or more for users armed with new iPods and iTunes Music Store gift certificates.

This is a followup to my earlier blog entry titled Zune Birth: Does it Already Suck?

And now to explore the other avenue: Zune won’t suck. It will take some market share from the iPod, and “cannibalize” perhaps half of the other 30% of the market. I use the term “cannibalize” because there’s the iPod, and there’s the others. This is not snobbery; everybody’s gunning for the iPod. To wit, a Google search for “iPod killer” shows over four million pages indexed.

Competition is good.
iPod and iTunes Store pricing is then likely to feel a little more downward pressure than it would otherwise, and iPod storage capacity might creep up a bit faster than it would without the major league competition of the Zune.

Apple stock will suffer, and feelings will be hurt. Bragging rights will be split evenly between the good guys and the bad guys. Hands will be wrung, and blogging revenge will be exacted for years.

Ancillary Effects
Interestingly, even if iPod sales are halved or worse, it will have fulfilled its quiet mission: to sell Macs. Although the margins on Macs are not as lucrative as the margins on iPods, Apple is first and foremost a PC company, and selling more of its core product is always a good thing.

In addition, the iPod, once beaten back to less than half marketshare (let’s face it, it will happen one day), will have helped Apple see that the Mac is still the center of people’s electronic lives, with music entertainment, video entertainment and the like playing related but ultimately satellite roles for the foreseeable future.

Plug: buy an iPod Shuffle from Amazon and help this site.

This post could also be titled Long respected newspaper’s good intention’s run amuck. The Washington Post’s past sunday issue, 2006.10.22 (same articles also found on their website), published five articles on the iPod and/or the overall state of the digital music business. Good timing and a dose of awareness from the Post as the iPod’s birthday was that following monday, 2006.10.23.

Two of their respected Tech columnists handled the meaty bits relevant to the coming occasion. Those two pieces by Rob Pegoraro and Mike Musgrove were much more of an insight into the current state of the iPod and greater music market while the remaining three articles dealt with, “Let’s take three average sort of people and let them regale us with their very personal experiences of this iPod phenomenon”. Unfortunately, those latter insights, while making what could (and should) have been compelling points, were undone by false assertions and assumptions.

A bit of shameless self promotion, but I thought I would take this small blog post to link to my tuesday article published by Low End Mac (LEM) dealing with the subject at hand. I will admit to taking liberty with American English spelling and grammar rules, paper bag breathing induced ranting, riding the high horse, and overall making much ado about nothing. Really, who goes to mainstream news publications to get their hardcore tech news.

There are many more issues with which to be indignant about when it comes to our mainstream print media’s coverage. Sure, there are some very good tech columnist, but the articles I reference were from a writer who is usually on the Telecom beat and two guest correspondents. Please note, I wrote the LEM article late sunday/early monday morning (it was not posted until tuesday because I don’t usually do monday content) and I had one too many home made chocolate chip cookies. I think I can speak for all of us when I say “WOO BOY!”, after partaking in one too many freshly baked circular goodies. Then again, it is the internet and I think I am about par for this binary course.

The linked piece on LEM is longish when compared to an average “blog” entry. Not Ars Technica indepth and overflowing with many savory details long, but a little bit of a read compared to an average blog post. I’m just warning people on short lunch/smoking/bathroom/my damn kids are hellish minions and I just want a few minutes to clear my mind breaks.

I don’t want to rehash my same points again, but I will add some more tidbits not in the Low End Mac thesis. MacUser’s Dan Moren beat me to the punch with a sunday and follow up monday posting on this issue. Particularly interesting was Dan Moren’s uncovering of Neal Mueller’s maybe not so objective viewpoint. Apparently, Mr Mueller’s mountain climbing efforts are in some way sponsored by Creative, the very same music company who’s music player he lavishly praises while (hyperbole warning) eviscerating the iPod’s very state of existence. The erudite and silver-tongued, err(?), dexterous fingered (that just sounds dirty) John Gruber also weighs in on the whole escapade.

Enjoy the links. Especially the one to Low End Mac (Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. You know what I’m saying, you know what I’m saying).

I just rediscovered how to do this after knowing it then somehow forgetting it long ago.

If you listen to streaming radio with iTunes and can’t be bothered to do one of the various methods of finding the station in iTunes, this is the tip for you. You don’t have to use iTunes to start your stream; in fact iTunes need not be open.

Tested with iTunes 4 and iTunes 7; should work with 5 and 6 also.

1. grab a radio icon from iTunes
   
2. drag it to the Documents half of your Dock, it will take on the Web address Mac OS icon
   
3. click on it
   
4. that will open a web page in a browser and trigger a download of a file called something like listen.pls edit: name depends on the radio station
   
5. drag listen.pls to a nice location for long-term storage, then rename it and drag it onto your Documents half of your Dock edit: after renaming the downloaded file, Get Info -> Lock it

   

That’s it, all done. Enjoy.

A few things I’ve managed to dig up about Cover Flow, Apple’s cover art browsing component for iTunes:

• cover art is not portable between Macs and/or libraries
• iT 7 built-in artwork finder is often inaccurate, and never complete
• if it’s the wrong image, use Ctr-Click -> Clear Downloaded Artwork
• if your music is sorted by artist, movie soundtracks and other compilations will have [number of tracks on the album] positions in the jukebox, one for each track
• you can take the if you want it done right… approach

And then there’s artwork and album versioning. Different labels can and do release their own versions of albums, complete with different artwork (and many times different tracks, but that’s a result of the album’s production).

I think the only ones of us who can look forward to perfect Cover Flow artwork are the Britney-and-Janet buying crowd. But an imperfect technology can still be a joy to use, and seeing artwork for my music that I haven’t seen since I lost the CD jewel case is fun. And the visual analogy gives us a new method of choosing music.

It’s imperfect, but I like it.