A nice refresher, from the Sunday NYT no less, about how iTunes and DRM hurts perfectly innocent customers, fails to stop piracy, and reduces competition. Bonus stat: emusic implies every music label except the big four now allows at least some distribution of tunes without DRM.
well, I think that’s a good start (what says emusic). When will be the day those four companies understand that DRMs aren’t the best way to combat the ‘piracy’? I have bought DRMed music on iTunes but, obviously I have had to ‘violate’ the DRMs using the hacks we all know. It’s obvious. But those companies are really blind.
But emusic seems to demand a subscription of 12.99 Euros per month, though that can apparently be cancelled immediately. That’s 12.99 that I have to pay for the first song that I decide I want to download, even if I don’t find anything else that I want to download. The existence of a free-trial period doesn’t fully remove this feeling.
It doesn’t sound like customer-friendly pricing. I can’t see this allowing one emusic song to be such a hit via direct linking and individual downloads that it makes emusic famous.
And that free trial period is not possible without entering your credit card details, allowing automatic billing after the free-trial period. This is the AOL way of billing that people know and hate.
If you don’t want to buy stuff from iTunes, buy the CD instead. What’s the big deal?