Jinn of Quality and Risk

Music giveaways are believed to foster customer loyalty. Expect Apple to sign many contracts allowing companies such as MacDonald's and Pepsi to give away millions upon millions of songs. Doing the same with CDs would be prohibitively expensive (and a logistic nightmare). A gift code to be redeemed by downloading one song at Apple's iTunes Music Store is easy to print and track. Plus it works on both MacOS and Windows platforms. Plus it encourages people to buy an iPod. Who wins? music lovers, and artists.

In 2004, people will download a huge number of free songs thanks to such marketing campaigns, thus putting yet another nail into the coffin of the slowly agonising CD rip-off (hint: don't invest in record companies). Talking of which reminds me that I need to review my (excellent) year 2003, while trying to remember what my resolutions were, as well as my predictions, if any. Then onwards to the year-2004 resolutions and predictions!