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Real Cuts Prices for DRM-Restricted Music
Flint Dragon writes "A story on MSNBC details RealNetworks' next step in converting iPod users from iTunes to their own online music store. Not only can you play music downloaded from their site on your iPod now, you can, for a limited time, purchase music for 50% cheaper (.49/song, 4.99/album)! This is the price that I'm willing to pay for. Too bad it won't last..."
Hmmm.... How many hoops is a lot? And what are they, I personally didn't find any hoops to jump through other than giving them a credit card number to charge to?
Ted Tschhopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Tell me: how are things in la la land? I hear you guys are still using BeOS on RISC chips to play your $.10 legal FLAC files. But that might just be a rumor.
Listen: for Apple and the other music stores to lower their prices so drastically, they'd have to be able to sell at least 4 times as many songs at $.25 as they do at $1. Assuming that the overhead would also be decreased by a factor of four.
But sales wouldn't increase four fold. Overhead and licensing charges would remain the same. So it's not going to happen. Just like they're not going to drop the DRM (because they wouldn't be able to convince as many labels, thus reducing the library without bringing in that many additional customers).
I'm sorry things have costs and restrictions. You just keep stealing and feel vindicated that no damned obnoxious artist is going to get your hard earned cash. Artists, meh. They're worse than the government.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It grants you the right to make backups, but it does not grant you the right to make perfect backups. There is a legal distinction there. With iTunes, you can burn your music to a CD and re-rip it to any DRM-free format you like. However, there will be a quality loss. Furthermore, iTunes allows you to burn a single compilation of your music up to 7 times, which you can do with what you please. This of course, ignores the fact that you can just duplicate the DRM-free CD as many times as you want and bypass the 7-burn limit entirely (with no quality loss), if you want to make a CD for your family members and give it out at Christmas or something.
iTunes strikes a very fair balance between consumer rights and protection against illegal distribution.