May is music month at Apple, and Steve Jobs kicked it off early today with the introduction of a new, slimmer series of iPods and iTunes 4.

The iPod is as slick as ever, but it’s the new music service that has really caught my eye. Here’s a legal music offering that has no subscription requirements, a fairly decent price (99¢/track, $9.99/album) and — most important — allows you to burn CDs.

Jobs & Co. have managed to pull together 200,000 tracks from the Big 5 labels and are offering them with album art and 30-sec previews for 1-Click buying. For now, the service is only available on Macs; a Windows version will come later this year.

It will be fascinating to see how the market responds to this offering. (And the new commercials. My favorite: a youngster does Lose Yourself. Not that he could have seen the movie, of course. It was rated R!)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2003 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Miscellany.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.