iTunes LP format: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
As an artist with an album selling on iTunes, one of the more interesting developments was the new iTunes LP format. Hypebot has an article explaining what the iTunes LP format offers (and shows the video, also available on www.apple.com). To make a long story short, when you double-click your deluxe iTunes album, the entire iTunes browser window becomes a home screen for your album, and you get access to the songs, lyrics, commentary, photos, video, you name it, depending on what the artist (and label, more on that below) wants on it.
My initial reaction is that this is a great idea. I am old enough to have bought “records” back in the days where the vinyl LP was king, and cassettes the next most popular. I grew up right on that cusp around the mid-80s when CDs started coming out, and like many I bemoaned the loss of the beautiful cover art and gatefolds and all that great stuff that some albums had. I still have my copy of Led Zeppelin III with it’s spinning psychedelic wheel inside the cover, etc. If the iTunes LP can bring some of that back, that would be fantastic.
However, a few things gave me pause:
• To date, while all the major labels were given whatever SDK was necessary to sell music in iTunes LP format, no indie labels or artists are. This makes good marketing sense—of course they’d want to kick off the iTunes LPs with some very popular artists. But there’s always the anxiety if this will really trickle down to the rest of us.
• The current iTunes LPs are all more expensive than their non-LP counterpart. This may not be Apple’s fault. I’ve noticed that the prices of iTunes LPs are quite variable, so that implies that Apple isn’t controlling prices, unless they are simply taking more of the sales so that companies have to charge more (which I doubt, Apple hasn’t gouged any format yet). Certainly, if the labels expect to use iTunes LPs to increase sales, raising prices is not the way to do it. But then, if major labels have shown anything, it is the ability to not understand how to take advantage of any given situation.
• iTunes LPs are compatible only with iTunes 9 and greater. Now, I can tell you that with Ember After, probably 90% of our digital sales come from iTunes (the rest mostly from subscriptions services). So I don’t think being iTunes exclusive means everyone will be leaving tons of money on the the table. But still, it is something to think about. Also, I wonder if you could buy the iTunes LP, but then move the unprotected AAC files to another device. So if I use iTunes on my Mac but my smartphone were a Blackberry, if I could enjoy the full iTunes LP on iTunes on my Mac but still transfer the audio files themselves to the Blackberry (of course, I don’t know if Blackberry’s can play AAC files anyway, I have an iPhone…)
Nonetheless, I still think anything that helps bring back the artistry of the “album” is a fun thing. Even as I see releasing mostly EPs in the future, I can absolutely see compiling the EPs, adding some new songs and information/video/etc and compiling all of it into an iTunes LP. If possible…