My poor brother—no
doubt suffering from an excess of corrosive air to the lungs, due to his
residence in California—manages to completely
and totally misunderstand my post regarding iTunes.
I’m not advocating P2P (and neither is the original article I
linked to); I’m getting my music these days from eMusic, which offers DRM-free MP3s.
My dear brother fails to fully address my four criticisms of the iTunes
Music Store: it’s too expensive; AAC is lossy; it’s unfair
to artists; it’s really just a facelift for a corrupt
industry.
iTunes costs too much: 99¢/track is way too high, comparable to
the cost of a new CD and way more expensive. Yes, as Tom indicates
there is the convenience factor. But my preferred provider offers them
at 25¢–50¢, which means that a full CD runs $2–$8;
at that price the cost/benefit analysis turns out much better
for online downloads.
iTunes offers music in a poor format: AAC is lossy and DRMed. Yes,
eMusic’s MP3s are also lossy (and the format itself is patented,
which is awful)—but they are also cheaper and freer. If I’m
going to be paying more than twice the price of a used CD, I’d
like sound at least as good as that CD. The ideal would be music
encoded in Ogg Vorbis (as a lossy,
quick download format) and in FLAC for high-quality listening.
As to DRM Tom says, Yeah, DRM sucks, but please explain to me how
anybody makes any money if nobody's buying anything?
Somehow the
artists on eMusic are making money without DRMing their music. These
aren’t necessarily indie artists, either: Otis Redding (well, his
label is making money anyway); Frank Zappa; Townes van Zandt; 50 Cent;
Green Day; Tom Waits; the Kinks; Bob Marley; Willie Nelson &c.
Oh—if high-quality music is only 1½–2 times the size
of poor-quality music, we don’t need huge jump in
bandwidth
to download it: we’d need twice the time or twice
the bandwidth or some combination thereof.
iTunes is unfair to artists: Apple gets a 35% cut of each track for
doing almost work. They rip the track and encode it into AAC, then make
it available on their site and provide cheques on some schedule to the
labels. This is not rocket science, folks. I don’t know what the
standard discount for a record store is, but in books stores get a 40%
discount—but they actually have to deal with leases, clerks and so
on. I don’t know the terms of eMusic’s agreement with the
labels, and so I don’t know if they’re better, but that
doesn’t matter: I am not advocating for eMusic, but against
the iTunes Music Store.
iTunes is too bogus. Nyaaah:-)
