I bought my first mp3s online today; I am very happy to report that I didn’t do it through Apple. I don’t plan to make a habit of it – CDs have served me well for the last 21 years, and I see no reason to stop buying them now – but “And Try” by Ten Days Till is an excellent song, and is unavailable on CD. And is unavailable without DRM from iTunes, and I didn’t feel like signing up for a subscription service just to get it. Amazon, however, has it available without encryption; Amazon now also has a bit more of my money. (Though not very much in the grand scheme of my purchases through them…)
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Yes, the Amazon MP3 store looks *seriously* interesting. I have a whole list of songs I’m interested in buying from iTunes (hundreds) but I’ve only bought about 15 so far, largely because of DRM. Yes, I’ve done the burn-and-rip technique (undoubtedly there are DRM-strippers out there as well) but the overhead of doing this, plus management of the authorized set of computers, is really an impediment to me buying DRM-protected stuff from iTunes. The iTunes Plus DRM-free tracks are interesting — I don’t find the higher price to be a significant issue — but there are disappointingly few iTunes Plus tracks I’m interested in. Even with “only” 2 million tracks, the Amazon MP3 store has a pleasantly surprising number of my tracks of interest available. I may be making some purchases myself soon.
Then there’s the matter of the $$$ my wife has spent on iTunes tracks. We’ll have to figure out how to deal with those….
9/26/2007 @ 9:20 am