Negative Nancy? That’s kind of a panzy term isn’t it? Well I guess, but I’m not really that upset with Apple, at least not as much as others out there – namely Adobe, Lala fans, those still waiting for iPads, those still boycotting AT&T to get an iPhone and the entire music industry who was forced to liveby the iTunes standard of $.99 music.

These people are not on Apple’s good side. Not right now at least. Did you see the public letter (pseudo blog post) from Steve Jobs on the Adobe Flash thing? I think this sentence sums it up best:

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

For lala, you had to see it coming. iTunes wants to be in the cloud and lala has the tools and the talent. That is why Apple picked it up. News broke heavy today from lala themselves saying they will be closing their doors on May 31st with all credits moving into iTunes. Blogger Ask Manny had this to say about the shut down of the popular cloud streaming service:

While I don’t feel “betrayed” as I did when Last.FM sold out to its parent company CBS, I do have VERY mixed feelings about this move. I know Apple will come up with something in June and that something will likely have its home in the “cloud” as FastCompany accurately assesses: think “web-based iTunes or something”.

In the music world many have a love-hate relationship with Apple. Many musicians rely on Mac computers to run their music recording and editing software (ever tried running Pro Tools on a PC?), most video editing and many other design related activities. The real issues they are facing are coming from 2 major roles Apple has played in the way that fans interact with music.

The first is taking the music business and turning it into once again a single-centric business. The iTunes store revolutionized the $.99 download and took away the creativity to artists to make a full body of work and concentrate on breaking singles. This has caused overall sales numbers to drop (you were selling a plastic disc for $12-20 and now you are selling one song for $.99), the focus of artists to shift and breakout artists to falter if their first single fails to catch on.

The second is the absence of Flash on Apple’s two leading devices the iPhone and iPad. In the Adobe rant from Apple they claimed that YouTube was responsible for about 40% of web video and that the iPad and iPhone came built with one of the best ways to discover and find videos on the service. The music industry disagrees. From an article on billboard.biz, they report:

…try finding Vevo content in the YouTube app for the iPad and iPhone. The only official Vevo content I could find was a short teaser for the Lady Gaga “Telephone” video with a link to view the full video on Vevo. Follow that link to the Vevo site and you get a landing page where you can leave your contact information to be notified when the official Vevo iPhone app becomes available.

It’s not just Vevo. Try searching for Warner Music Group artists like T.I. or Green Day. Mostly all you get are videos posted by individual users, not from the band or the label.

This is not good for Apple or the music industry. The article breaks it down further:

It’s not just music video services. The Web-based versions of streaming music sites like Rhapsody and Napster rely on Flash technology as well. Try navigating to Napster.comfrom an iPad or iPhone, and you’ll automatically be transferred to a mobile version of the service. It’s quite stripped down, but it allows you to play music. Now try it with Rhapsody. You can browse the site, but can’t play any songs as its browser-based player requires Flash.

It is going to be an interesting period with Apple having so much control over the media market. What do you think? Is Apple a Negative Nancy or are people over-reacting to change?

Let’s talk in the comments below.

Greg Rollett is a Rock Star Internet Marketer from Orlando, FL. He blogs about Lifestyle Design and Online Marketing.

Tags: Apple, iPad, iPhone, itunes, music industry