Fruity Tunes

Looks like Apple is creating an online music service. This must be the ‘music to your ears’ announcement that everyone was talking about. Here is another article for the registration phobic.

Looks like they will be charging 99¢ per song, which seems to be a fair price. I hope they can get enough music from the notoriously stingy record companies. It doesn’t seem too different from existing services (not that I have tried any of them), but the name Apple might lend some weight to it, particularly for Macintosh and iPod users.

In other news (from the times article):

Indeed, the company is expected to announce the next generation of its iPod portable music player on Friday

Yea! I was waiting for this. I just replaced my CD player, but would definitely move to an iPod if it included some new features (particularly a radio). The iPods are so well designed, they seem to be a pleasure to use.

I submitted this story to slashdot, and stupidly put a link to this blog in it. Slashdot hasn’t picked it up, and they probably won’t since I doubt I am the only submitter, but if they did this site could be in for a slashdoting.

Update: Slashdot picked this story up. One of the longer discussions I’ve seen there. They didn’t use my submission though. Looks like they wanted to wait until Apple actually announced it. Also iTunes 4 is here as well as the new iPod.