03 April 2007

Unrestricted iTunes Songs

I think it's great that Apple and EMI have agreed to allow people to download unrestricted music. I hope other record companies follow suit. One of the reasons I chose iTunes to download music (even before I had an iPod) was because, at the time, it was the only store (I think) to allow you to burn a song to a regular audio CD without any restrictions.
I've blogged before about how I feel about record companies. I still feel similarly. I think they are really greedy, but I suppose 30 cents may be a fair premium. Steve Jobs has claimed in the past, though, that the 99 cent price point was essential for consumers to buy music. Hopefully they won't raise prices for copy-protected songs.
There's an article that says that the idea of prices was EMI's, not Apple's.
What I would really like to see next is the record companies allowing people from other countries to download music. I like Canadian, British and Australian music, and it can sometimes be really difficult to download this music, because although Apple has licensed the music for the the other country's market, people outside of that market cannot download it. I can order a CD from Canada, Britain or Australia, but this sometimes takes a long time and also is pretty expensive (especially in Britain, where CDs cost 10 pounds which doesn't seem too bad until you realise how much 10 pounds is in dollars ($19.72, according to Google))

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