iTunes music will now be available to iPhone and iPod touch owners without the need for a desktop PC.
Steve Jobs today, at a special Apple event in San Francisco, demonstrated the new wireless iTunes store. Available only on the new iPod touch and the Apple iPhone, the store will feature the same catalog as the standard iTunes store, at least where music is concerned. According to Jobs' presentation, tracks will still be available for $0.99, and users will be able to preview a song before they buy. No word on whether videos will be available, but we suspect that size limitations will keep them from being sold wirelessly.
Apple also announced a special arrangement with Starbucks coffee. When iTunes Wi-Fi store customers are within range of a Starbucks Wi-Fi hotspot (which themselves represent a partnership with T-Mobile, strangely), the new iTunes store will reflect the currently playing track in that coffee shop, and list the last 10 songs to play. Users will be granted special, free access to the iTunes store while at Starbucks, but will have to pay for full T-Mobile HotSpot access, just like everyone else.
The real innovation here is not just Apple's entry into the market, but rather the ability to download complete albums as a whole, rather than downloading songs piecemeal. While other over the air music stores, such as Sprint's music store, already offer a massive catalog at the $0.99 price point, those stores do not support an automated queue for downloading multiple tracks. Hopefully, Apple's store will let you click once to purchase an album, instead of forcing you to download each track successively.
The new store will be active in all of the markets currently served by the iTunes store, and should be active within the next few weeks. The Starbucks partnership will roll out slowly, with New York and Seattle opening up first, and all other WiFi-enabled stores rolled into the deal by 2009.
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