As the Apple Turns: Scene 4335: We Just Felt So Darn Alone (11/14/03)

We Just Felt So Darn Alone (11/14/03)

Ladies and gentlemen, we are thrilled to announce the latest endeavor by the folks who perfected the art of self-defeatingly esoteric wiseass tech drama and spewed it all over you for the past six years. Prepare yourselves for... the AtAT Music Store! That's right, people, we're going into the downloadable music business. We're going to have songs. Like, 200,000 of them or something. Maybe more, or possibly much, much fewer. The details on quantities haven't really been ironed out yet, but there will be songs, that much you can count on. Maybe. Oh, and they're going to be cheap-- less than 99 cents, we figure, unless something happens that makes them more than 99 cents. But we can state with all certainty that they won't cost exactly 99 cents, we can promise you that. But don't hold us to it.

In fact, you know what? Just forget about the details, because you can check it all out for yourselves when the AtAT Music Store launches in two weeks. Or next year sometime.

Maybe June. June's good.

Okay, fine, to be honest, we have no idea when it'll launch. It might be quite a while. In fact, we haven't done anything at all to prepare the AtAT Music Store short of making this announcement, and the only reason we're doing that is because we just didn't want to feel left out. Seriously, everyone's got a downloadable music service these days-- it's like the mid-to-late-2003 equivalent of the Rubik's Cube in terms of sheer ubiquity; we're pretty sure they're even giving them away down at the bank when you open a new checking account.

Actually, let us qualify that slightly: everyone's announced a downloadable music service, which is why we figured we should hop on the bandwagon before it ran us over. Oh, don't give us that look, we are not alone in this; a United Press International article confirms the buzz that's been circulating for weeks, reporting that even Walmart is getting into the iTunes Music Store cloning game with a new service launching "as soon as next week" and boasting 200,000 songs priced at "less than the customary 99 cents charged by competitors."

As for the very latest development in the "Everybody's Got A Music Service" saga, we were informed by email last night that MP3.com has sold "certain assets" to CNET, and consequently will "no longer be accessible in its current form" in less than three weeks. Why? Because, as MacMinute reports, CNET "plans to introduce a new online music service in the near future." Oh, goody-- CNET, too! Gee, this couldn't possibly be the reason why CNET has been so desperately down on the iPod and iTunes lately, could it? Nawwwww...

So, Walmart and CNET are the two latest me-toos in the race to lose oodles of cash selling downloadable music-- well, and us, of course. And don't worry about us falling into the trap of selling music and losing money on every song. Just as Apple sells money-losing songs at the iTMS in order to boost sales of money-making iPods, we're going to sell money-losing songs in order to promote our daily money-losing online Apple-flavored soap opera! See how that works?

SceneLink (4335)

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From the writer/creator of AtAT, a Pandemic Dad Joke taken WAYYYYYY too far

The above scene was taken from the 11/14/03 episode:

November 14, 2003: Apple's iPod marketing goes off the scale to snag as many holiday buyers as possible. Meanwhile, Walmart and CNET are the two latest entities to work on iTunes Music Store clones, and Big Mac may be the third-fastest supercomputer out there right now, but 2005's Blue Gene/L will stomp it and all others into a sticky paste...

Other scenes from that episode:

4334: MUST... BUY... NEW... iPOD... (11/14/03) Want to know how you can tell we've officially entered the consumer frenzy known as the Holiday Shopping Season(TM), which encompasses both pre-occasion thematic sales and post-holiday clearances? Clue number 1: look at the calendar and note that it's after Easter...
4336: All A Matter Of Perspective (11/14/03) Well, people, it looks like you can head into the weekend secure in the knowledge that the whole supercomputer race thingy has wound to a close for now. The Dongarra Report hasn't been updated in over a week, so Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" G5-based cluster is still sitting at 10.280 teraflops and will presumably keep that score in the new TOP500 rankings, which will be officially introduced during the Supercomputer Conference starting tomorrow...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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