Charles Arthur: 'Popular? Apple's Music Store sold 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours of operation'

A month or so ago I met a teenage short-order cook from Newcastle – he was waiting to get a computer game autographed – and we got talking about music. What sort of stuff did he listen to? In what form did he buy it? I didn't imagine that he'd have much spare cash to buy CDs at £14 a throw.

His tastes turned out to be abstruse – remixes of dance tracks that don't really make it to general release here. And his acquisition medium? File-sharing networks, via the broadband cable in his parents' home, where he still lived. He was thinking of moving out soon, but one thing he was going to ensure was that he could get cable in his own place too. "The thing is, I can't buy the stuff I want in the shops," he said. Ironic, as we were in London's Tower Records, which has one of the biggest ranges of music in the country; but also true, for £20 a month, he could get all the CDs he wanted (in MP3 format) online.

What chance, then, do the music companies have of persuading someone like him to go with a legitimate scheme – such as Apple's newly launched Music Store, announced last month? Admittedly, the hurdle to use is quite high: you'll need a Macintosh, have to run the new OS X operating system (ideally, the latest version, 10.2), the latest version of the iTunes music program and, ideally, a broadband connection. Oh, and if you want to buy any of the 200,000 tracks there, you'll need to live in the US.

This last condition will have many Apple users in the UK grinding their teeth in impotent rage, as they've seen many Apple initiatives launched in the US and never cross the pond – such as online photo printing for the iPhoto picture-organising program, or maps and local details for the Sherlock program. For most other people, the first condition will be the sticking point. But wait: Apple says it will develop a version of iTunes for Windows, and launch its store "by the end of the year". It has even posted the job vacancy on Monster.com, so it must be serious.

And a British, or European, Apple Music Store? Pascal Cagni, the company's European head, says that's down to the record labels agreeing the digital rights, plus the problem of offering enough local content to interest people. But like all computer companies, Apple is very experienced at creating national versions of online stores. Cagni says he'd rather get the content right than rush into anything. "We have to go at the pace of the slowest of the [five] major record labels," Cagni told me last week. And that can be very slow.

You can "preview" a track, which streams the first 30 seconds for free. You can search for music by artist name or album or genre or (usefully for classical music) composer. All very slick, very simple, because it's tightly defined.

In the US, you can buy the track. Want the third movement of Beethoven's Eighth? You can, for 99 cents. Click a button and down the line it comes. Popular? Sure thing – Apple reported selling 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours of operation. It's the sort of start a lot of the other online services, including BT's "dotmusic" subscription download service, launched early in March, would have sacrificed farmyard animals for.

Viewed in isolation, Apple seems to have got almost every element right. Unlike BT, you don't pay a subscription; you just buy the music. Apple has signed up all the major labels. (BT hasn't got Sony on board yet.) You can burn it to a CD, from iTunes, as often as you like. (BT users can only burn certain artists' songs to CD.) It will play on up to three computers; dotmusic is limited to one. (What if you have two computers in your house?) The music is encoded in "AAC" format at 128kbps, which sounds as good as an MP3 at 160kbps, but the file is one-quarter smaller.

For users, letting them burn the music to a CD and listen on multiple computers is the key to convenience. It's about trust; Apple at least seems to be saying it trusts people not to share. (While I haven't had time to try, I suspect that re-encoding a CD made from an AAC track into MP3 would sound dire. So it's a trust built on confidence. And users of iTunes 4 can encode their own CDs into AAC without such restrictions.)

Yet it's the encoding that is potentially the most interesting aspect of it all. For some time there's been a two-way struggle in the music world between MP3, which anyone can trade freely over file-sharing networks, and Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which can have licensing restrictions – such as "don't burn me to a CD" – encoded in the track.

But suddenly AAC, which is an open standard, looks a noteworthy competitor to WMA, and hence Microsoft. Yes, Apple's market share is tiny; but bear in mind that the artists and producers use its stuff extensively – it's hard to find a modern album where a Mac hasn't been involved in the sound production. If record execs bumping into each other start murmuring about AAC instead of WMA (and they certainly won't mention MP3), things could change radically. And when iTunes for Windows arrives, it will of course play AAC (and, I'd wager, offer high-quality MP3 encoding, which Microsoft presently doesn't). Subtly, very subtly, Apple is infiltrating its historic rival's territory. If the record labels decide that they like the cut of Apple's jib, and the store takes off, AAC might abruptly become a widespread format.

That's the isolated view. But what does all this mean for the short-order cook from Newcastle who wants his specialist tracks? He was inured to the viruses and fake tracks that are becoming endemic on the file-sharing networks; he viewed them just as a necessary annoyance. The music he likes won't be on Apple's store, or anyone else's, for years, if ever. He'd like being guaranteed a clean file. But while 200,000 tracks sounds a lot, it's equivalent to fewer than 20,000 albums. Every year, tens of thousands are released. And there are decades of music waiting to be encoded.

For the music companies, it's going to be a long haul to offer people something that equals the scope of what's already out there for free. Yet for Apple, there's only upside once it's paid for its outlay on the store – which can only get bigger, with more tracks, more people buying them, and perhaps even a few converts to its platform.