KEY POINTS:
So Apple's Steve Jobs finally decided to send a little sweet music our way. About bloody time. A year after the Australians were granted access to the world's most popular music download store, the door opens for us.
This is something to celebrate. We finally have access to
one of the most successful integrated entertainment systems in the world.
No longer do thousands of New Zealand iPod owners have to buy whole albums at $25 a shot just to listen to the three or four good tracks on them. Now you can buy iPod-compatible tracks individually from your computer using a credit card.
Keeping us out of that loop any longer would have been too much of a slap in the face. The pricing is competitive - $1.79 a track and $17.99 for an album.
With two million songs available and 65,000 podcasts - including a growing collection of home-grown podcasts from TVNZ, Radio New Zealand and The Voice Booth - the selection should meet most tastes.
The iTunes software that organises your music library is free to download and works on PCs and Apple Mac computers.
The new Apple Store, which lets you buy Apple gear online, is a great improvement on the existing Apple site. There's now enough choice for the anti-piracy flag bearers to point to in their crusade against the nasty Bittorrent services that let you download music free.
While I'd still rather see the iPod compatible with a range of music download services to keep Apple honest in the long run, the iTunes-iPod model is seamless.
Why mess with something that already works well and is so popular?
There have been various reasons proffered for the delay in iTunes getting here, but never from Apple or its local distributor Renaissance, who have kept mum over the past year on iTunes' no show.
It's been suggested that Apple wanted to wait until changes to the Copyright Act, now before Parliament, were made to legalise "format-shifting", which allows people to shift music from CD to computer to music player. At present this is, strictly speaking, still illegal.
Rumours flew last month that Renaissance, after a profitable run with the iPod, was due to be dumped as distributor as Apple moved directly into the local market. Maybe the iTunes debut was being held up by the untying of that relationship. However, Renaissance still has Apple's business, at least for another year, its boss, Paul Johnston, told me.
The delay is most likely to be due to the drawn-out negotiations that had to take place to license access to the various music labels' catalogues for New Zealand and to strike deals to feature New Zealand's many great musicians on the website. In other words, it came down to money.
As for Digirama, Amplifier and CokeTunes - the existing local download services that offer music in the WMA format which isn't compatible with the iPod - iTunes' arrival isn't necessarily bad news.
Apple's debut to some extent knocks the wind out of the sales of the Vodafone Music Store, which was launched last month at $1.99 a track, 20c dearer than iTunes. Still, the premium on Vodafone music is worth paying for those wanting the extra copy to play on their mobile phones.
The bottom line is that the more marketing Apple does, the greater the awareness among the public of music downloading and its benefits - lower prices and greater convenience.
But, to survive and grow, the existing players need to be smart, improving their relationships with the major alterna-tive music-player makers such as Creative, iRiver and SanDisk, which has been making solid progress in the US with low-cost, high-capacity flash memory players.
There'll need to be some attractive bundling deals offered by retailers where you can buy a music player and online music store credit for a competitive price.
If Microsoft had had the sense to make its Zune player compatible with its own PlaysForSure digital media standard - ensuring compatibility with the great music download services here and abroad - there would finally have been a compelling alternative to the iPod. As it stands, the first iteration of the Zune is a patchy effort and not available to us yet anyway.
Expect iTunes gift vouchers to appear in a good number of Christmas stockings this year and the arrival of the iTunes store should keep iPods in the usual pre-Christmas short supply.
I stupidly left my 30GB video iPod on a Brisbane-to-Christchurch Air New Zealand flight a few weeks ago and it's never reappeared.
Still, I'll be tuning in, downloading some new tunes and podcasts, and piping the sound through my stereo system from my laptop. There's nothing stopping you doing the same.
