Monday, January 12, 2009

The Problem with iTunes Plus

Picture 1.pngI love that I can now buy music from iTunes without having to deal with DRM. The variable pricing is annoying, but I can live with it. What I don't like is the fact that it costs $.30 to upgrade your songs to iTunes Plus, and you have to do it all at once. That is, if there's one song I need to use without DRM (to put in a slideshow, for example), then I'm stuck. $50 (see picture) is a lot of money to have to pay when I have already spent about $170. That's crazy. Consider that I could buy an iPod shuffle for the same amount of money. And again, this is just to truly own the songs that I already "bought."

Either way, this is a lot better. What has always bugged me about DRM was that, in a way, it actively encouraged stealing music. I, for example, buy my music, but can't put it on my Blackberry Pearl (as difficult as it is to do). My friend, however, can steal music and put it on whatever device he wants. What's my reward for buying up? Being stuck! Glad we're done with that.

4 comments:

brown said...

wait are u saying that if i already bought a song for 99 cents, i have to pay the difference if it gets upgraded to still listen to it?

Tabz said...

No. Sorry, it's just that much money to make them iTunes Plus, which means better quality and the DRM gone (so you can use it on whatever device you want). Right now, if you try to put it on your BlackBerry, for example, the purchased ones won't go.

But you don't have to pay at all. They'll keep working.

Anonymous said...

just burn the song u bought fron iTunes to a CD, eject the CD and put it back in and u should be able to convert all those songs into mp3 which allows u to put them where ever u would like.

Pado said...

@anonymous: you are correct but that would cause a loss in quality. You could, however, bittorrent the songs you have purchased and convert them to whatever format you like. I am not advocating piracy, I just think you should be allowed to do what you like with things you've bought =]

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