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Why Won't Apple Sell Your iTunes LPs?
jfruhlinger writes "Over the weekend there's been a bit of controversy over the fact that Apple has effectively shut indie artists out of the iTunes LP market by charging $10,000 in design fees. But the real question is why Apple is in charge of designing the new iTunes LP at all, since the format is based on open Web design technologies. There's at least one iTunes LP already available outside the iTunes store. Why won't Apple sell it?"
It seems to me that Apple hates it's customers and is angry that it depends on them for revenue.
Apple is not run for the benefit of their customers, but for the shareholders, executives and their friends.
They hate you, and their corporate behaviour says so again and again.
But some victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^H customers just keep going back.
the eye-candy is so... pretty... but they are not your friend. They still remember the time when you (their customers) left them and apple nearly went down the pan, and they blame you.
Because, as they've shown time and time again, the big difference between them and Microsoft is the total amount of power wielded. They've made it known that they're a competitor in the Industry of Evil.
And they just don't have the time to go over everyones code.
And don't have the competency to write some static screening tools that will reject all the XSS stuff etc?
And don't have the legal chops to write contractual language that will let them pwn your ass if you do submit LP's with XSS etc in them?
While putting a paywall up does have the advantage of creating a somewhat self-policing marketplace in this regard, my sense is that a $500 fee would do the same job and not exclude smaller players. It isn't the fact of the fee but its size that provides the evidence of Apple's malicious intent in preventing iTunes users from having access to LPs from smaller players.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
This is basically what happened with the iPhone, at $600 they didn't sell as well as they could have and gave Apple time to make enhancements before dropping the price.
Some of us see the release of a smartphone without MMS and without the ability to take apps anywhere but the browser (which is what the iPhone was like when it was released) to be beta-quality at best. We're talking about a phone missing major functionality. Apple didn't hold that castrated phone back from the consumer though, so it's nothing like what happened with the iPhone. Instead, Apple released a phone which only early adopters and fanboys would buy, and they bought one. Then when Apple got their act together enough to add the rest of the needed functionality, they did so. It did not harm consumers in any way. Nor would changing the format for iTunes LPs; there is no reason they could not convert from an old format to a new format, and there's no particular reason the iTunes client couldn't support both formats.
So no, this is nothing like what happened with the iPhone, and this is an even more bullshit excuse than wanting to maintain high quality.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Agreed. This sounds like more crap for me to not care about and possibly purge during the acquisition process.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Right clicking is extremely hard for normal people, why do you think it only recently made its way onto the mac?
It's been here forever, it's just that Mac people aren't afraid to use the keyboard in addition to the mouse, unlike you Windows mouth-breathers who can't find it if there's not a button on the mouse for it.
X-Windows users are of course the more vastly intelligent species still, doing everything with keyboard and form the start properly grouping mice buttons in threes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's because you like shit music. Proper bands only have 5 tracks on an album, max.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."