An the online music killer app is...

iTunes.

It's the real reason the iPod has been so sucessful. Sure, the iPod is a great piece of kit and works very well. It's cool, sylish and functional. Without doubt, it is one of the best portable music players around. I have a 1GB shuffle which I use mostly in they gym. It's iTunes that makes it the killer device though.

That's because iTunes is the killer app.

It does a great job of importing and managing music collections and it does it as a free download with no obvious(*) strings attached. You can use it to play that music on your PC. It does all this well enough for it to be a worth while download. You might even sign up to the iTunes store and buy some music to download.

Of course, once you've downloaded iTunes and played with it for a while, imported a bunch of your CDs into it and gotten used to it when it comes to buying a portable music player, there's now an obvious choice. It's an iPod. Job done, another iPod sold...


(*) There are a few strings with iTunes. The store music is AAC encoded and iTunes only interfaces with iPods. I think this is reasonable. The makers (Apple) are entitled to decide what to do with the software and players they produce.

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