Letters to the Editor
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To the folks pointing out the CD work-around for iTunes
When I pointed out that you're ruining your songs this way you say that the distortion is only minimal. Even if you're right, I still don't get why you like this idea -- you've still got to burn and then rip your music in order to break it out of FairPlay, which you don't have to do with unrestricted MP3s. Don't you see some added benefit in that?
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With all due respect...
from the article:
"...Nearly everything you purchase from the store will never work on any device not made by Apple."
Um, I bought an REM album, burned it to a CD and listened to in in the car on the way home. I think that the car stereo was made by Harmon Kardon, not Apple. So I guess you need to fact check a little.
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Bought 2 Albums at Amazon
first came in fine
2nd took 27 minutes on the phone w/ Amazon to download
don't know if I'll get a 3rd
A
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If If If
Farhad is right (and wrong) about the CD workaround; YES you could lose quality/pick up artifacts, but NO, you won't notice them unless you're listening on High-Fidelity headphones, (and NO, most people who care enough to buy those phones aren't going to listen to MP3's). YES, it is a pain to use this workaround, but NO, it doesn't negate the point that iTunes songs CAN be used on non-apple devices.
My personal view is that, at this point, it is usually cheaper and more secure over the long run to just buy the CD. First, with the popularity of online music, CD's can be had for cheaper, especially if you use BMG or such. Contrary to the old pain-in-the-ass process of having to snail mail your feature decline every month, now you can do it online in seconds. You pay less, get better offers, and can generally find a good selection.
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Burn to CD? It's not even as hard as that.
You don't even have to burn to a cd and then re-encode. DRM is a pointless exercise in futility, as Apple locks up the music and yet has to give you the key to play it with.
Get on Google, invest 10 minutes in research, and download a tool that will strip the DRM out of the files. No downgrade in quality required.
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I am about as big an Apple fan as they come…
But I'd definitely go to Amazon first from now on. Non-DRM trumps DRM every time, and Amazon has done a great job of making the customer experience just as smooth as it is on iTunes, for Windows and Mac users alike. If the record companies are in trouble, it's because they give the customer two flawed buying options: entire physical CDs for obscenely high prices ($17 is crazy for 40 minutes of music), or the online indvidual tracks and sub-$10 album prices that customers want, but you'll always have to ask permission if you want to use it. I believe that most people are law-abiding and they'd pay for albums online if they were priced reasonably and lacked the condescending, oppressive DRM that assumes the customer is a criminal. Amazon does this.
It's a great next step for online music sales because successful competition against DRMed iTunes and a profitable non-DRM operation might help push all the record labels towards selling their music without DRM.
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Apple's margin vs record company wholesale prices
Still, there's stuff I don't get. How are the very same labels that bitched and moaned about Apple's refusal to price anything above 99 cents with DRM restrictions going to be willing to let Amazon sell their stuff for ten cents cheaper and without restrictions? I guess it's already happened with the first two that signed on, but I'm suspicious that some agreement is in place whereby Amazon agrees to jack up the price after a certain amount of time. I guess we'll see.
There's nothing mysterious about this. I'm pretty sure that answer is that Apple wishes to make more per sale than Amazon or Rhapsody or Napster. It seems much more likely that record companies have a fixed rate at which they sell songs and that Apple's markup from the wholesale price they pay for the song is $0.10 more than Amazon and others. The record companies could care less about the retail price, they only receive payment for the wholesale price. In fact, the lower the margin, the lower the retail price, and more sales for which the record companies receive the same wholesale price.
That would also explain Apple's claims that record companies won't let them sell songs for less. The consumer only sees the retail price, not the breakdown of wholesale price and margin. Lowering either one would lower prices and increase sales, so Apple can claim that the record companies won't let them sell songs for less than $0.99, but what they are really saying is that they aren't willing to reduce their margin so any cost reduction has to come from the wholesale price. The record companies aren't going to be willing to let Apple pocket a higher percentage of the retail price than their current arrangement.
Kinda like a Wal-Mart type of squeeze on the manufacturers - we want to lower our prices but not our margins so you should lower your wholesale prices.
Of course this strategy of blaming the supplier for your high prices doesn't work once real competition springs up and offers the same product with a lower margin.
What I don't understand is why the record companies don't get into this business and put everyone else out of business by charging $0.30/song or whatever the wholesale price is. The only guess I can make is that people don't want to have to go to several different sites to compile their music collection.
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Re: wholesale price
There's nothing mysterious about this. I'm pretty sure that answer is that Apple wishes to make more per sale than Amazon or Rhapsody or Napster. It seems much more likely that record companies have a fixed rate at which they sell songs and that Apple's markup from the wholesale price they pay for the song is $0.10 more than Amazon and others.
That may be true, but I don't know.
I just don't TRUST them.
How the "value" of media is determined is so loopey that I just can't trust them to give me a fair price on their own -- so outside entity (in this case Apple) needs to be there to force them to be fair to consumers.
Look at how TV shows are "valued" these days. A boxed season of "Deadwood" costs $100.00?? How was that "value" determined?
All I know is that if it were Microsoft that came out with iTunes instead of apple -- we'd all be paying $1.99 for new releases. Or RENTING them with some kind of subscription service (an even bigger rip off, IMHO). Who really wins when you pay someone (like Apple or Microsoft or Amazon) $120 a year to "rent" a single from Fergie?