At The Mercy Of The Poisoned Apple
Feb 10th, 2009 by epth
When Apple recently announced they were going DRM-free on their iTunes purchases, the world cheered. After all, they were charging 99 cents per song, and those songs were not songs per se but were restricted Apple “song files.” Yeah, they were pretty to listen to, but you could only burn them to CD a certain number of times and you couldn’t play them on an unauthorized computer. With no DRM, the world theorized, you could download a song from iTunes and actually own the song. You could take it with you, put it on a bunch of compilation CDs, transfer it to twelve computers, and so on. This was hailed as a great day in America. And it was, for NEW iTunes customers.
Existing customers, however, were caught in a vicious game. In order to get the new DRM-free music, they would have to upgrade their iTunes again, then upgrade their music files at 30 cents per file. This was not explained very well, so lots of people upgraded to DRM-free iTunes and then upgraded their music, only to find that their music wouldn’t play until they paid Apple some moolah. They couldn’t go back to the old way, either; what’s done is done. So, if they had 500 iTunes songs, they had to pay $150 to hear them again! Leave it to Apple to screw up something as great as DRM-free music, right?
And just FYI, I’m going to repeat this again…upgrading to DRM-free music in iTunes means upgrading every single pre-existing iTunes purchase at 30 cents a pop, and you can’t go back if you regret or misunderstand your decision. Also, most good songs are now $1.29 instead of $0.99 now, so budget appropriately.
Apple has been getting by on cool looks and the goodwill of early adopters for a while now. As people ooh and aah over things like the iPhone and MacBook Pro, Apple has been treating its Windows customers with an almost Microsoft-level contempt. Need I remind you they put out a version of iTunes that downloaded and installed the Safari browser without customer’s authorization? And tell me again why you can’t sync one-way from your iPod or iPhone to your computer…it would sure make things much easier after hard drive crashes.
While I agree with you on most of your ranting about Apple, a couple of things should be noted here, purely for accuracy’s sake:
1) Originally you had to upgrade all your iTunes music or nothing, but they have since changed that and now you can pick individual songs to upgrade.
2) The extra 30 cents is not their idea, the evil record companies are behind it. Apple just finally broke down. The protested for a long time, saying their songs would always be 99 cents, and the record companies all said “then they’ll be DRM’d”. Finally Apple caved.
The upside to this is that now some tracks (mostly older stuff, and that’s cool with this old fogie) are now 69 cents.
What? We don’t need no accuracy! I did know about the older tracks being 69 cents, and deliberately omitted that information to give my post more oomph. I didn’t, however, know they had changed their policy on upgrading to include an option for individual songs. Typical Apple — do the worst possible thing, then change it after everybody complains. It’s their main strategy these days.
It’s more like they changed it after all the fat-wallets did the mass upgrade, most likely including some tracks they would not have upgraded if it had been optional. Then to eek out extra money from the naysayers, they modified the policy. That makes it a much bigger conspiracy than just changing policies because of complaints.
That Apple, they’re pretty savvy. Funny how “savvy” and “evil” seem almost interchangable these days. Blame Obama?