New iPods and Musics Service from Apple

Today Apple announced its new line of iPods and a new music service that lets you download songs from the top 5 labels for 99¢. The songs are in AAC format which is supposed to give higher quality sound than mp3 for an equivalent bitrate. Although I didn’t find it on the Apple page, according to someone at MacSlash, there is a discount for complete cd’s, and you can re-download songs if for some reason they are lost. I’m interested in knowing what type of a deal Apple made with the labels and further, what type of deal is it for the artists. While it would be nice, I don’t see the artists getting more than the miniscule amount they get per cd. I’d like for a music service like this to succeed. The problem is that song collecting has become more like stamp collecting (metaphor from Tim). A lot of people just download songs to have them. They won’t necessarily listen to all of them, but it is just nice to have them, lots of them. Hopefully this isn’t the norm for most people.