iTunes Plus: The final reason to migrate your music collecting to Amazon MP3
There are times when, even as a devout user, I truly despise the money-grubbing nature of Apple.
iTunes, Apple's proprietary digital media player, was released at the 2001 Macworld Expo. For the past eight years, millions and millions of people have been collecting millions and millions of DRM-tagged albums and songs. I wrote about DRM, some time ago, after having gotten bitten trying to copy my iTunes library to a new iPod. Many many albums would not copy because I had reached my DRM limit of five instances. This irritation lead to my adoption of Amazon MP3 as my MP3 store of choice.
Now, iTunes has created a three-tiered pricing structure to accommodate their latest offering ... DRM-Free music from all four major labels: EMI. Sony BMG, Warner Music, and Universal. Digital rights management (DRM) restrictions have been the bane of iTunes since it's inception. Starting on April 1, all 10 million tracks in their catalog will cost 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29.
Can I upgrade my collection?
Yes, you can upgrade your collection. God help those of you who have invested thousands of dollars in iTunes. Upgrading is an all-or-nothing proposition. You will not have the option to pick and choose what you would like to upgrade.
Upgrading is simple. Click on Upgrade My Library under the Quick Links heading on the iTunes Store home page. Once there, you’ll see a list of all the songs and albums that are available for upgrading, with a price next to each. But the important number to look at is the price next to the Buy Now button, since that’s how much it will cost you to upgrade your library.
You have already shelled out 99 cents for every song in your collection ... be prepared to pay an additional 30 cents per song, 30 percent of the current album price for complete albums, and 60 cents for music videos to replace your collection with DRM-Free versions.
iTunes Extortion
In my opinion, this "upgrade" amounts to pure and simple extortion. An extortion that has been planned for ever since people started bitching about DRM. Apple executives foresaw an easy, brilliantly simple method by which they could bleed millions of dollars from loyal customers and they decided to wait until every one of them was deeply invested in iTunes. (Please don't bother arguing that it's the fault of the record labels. Amazon managed to strike a deal that allowed them to offer DRM-Free music over a year ago.)
Consider this: As of January 2009, the iTunes store has sold 6 billion songs at $.99 each for a net profit of approximately $5.94 billion dollars. Now, multiply that total by .3 ($.30/each). Apple's "Special Offer" has the potential to net them $1.782 billion dollars in additional revenue from product they ALREADY SOLD TO YOU.
Of course, not everyone will upgrade their collections, but I can only guess at how many hundreds of millions of dollars Apple's DRM-Free "Special Offer" stands to wring out of highly loyal customers. However, I don't have to guess at how much it will cost me. The number in bold right next to the Buy All button reads $88.06.
Will I upgrade? I haven't decided. I'd love to have access to all of my music collection, especially since I'll be upgrading several hardware components in the near future, but I'm still ticked off.
Thank goodness I wrote off the iTunes Store when I did ... I've purchased at least as many DRM-Free albums from Amazon since.
