Apple to change ITunes pricing

[jntaylor63]

What NoodleMaps said.

A 320 MP3 album with no BS DMR for 3.50 can't be beat! I can even get a CD WAV download for about 7.00.

I'm sorry, but this site has on-line music the way it should. Pay a great price for what you want and at what quality.

Use it now folks before the RIAA pays off some Russian offical and the site is shut down!

[ROF]

iTunes does not sell MP3s of any bit rate

[Kingnog]

Encoded properly, MP3 at 320 kbit/s are transparent with the original.

Agreed, thats what I was trying to say. ROF is full of it.

[SoCalMK]

The model that Apple adopted for I-Tunes is not very consumer friendly. The songs are basically the same overpriced CD's from the store, but in sheep's clothing. A previous poster is correct in stating that at roughly $1 per song, one does not save any money if he is to download a number of songs that is roughly equivalent to one CD. And while the prices are similar, you get it minus the artwork and now the task of transfering the songs onto a medium is given to the consumer; whether it be a blank CD or a portable player.

With all of this having been said, there are still advantages that services like I-Tunes offer. The most obvious one is that CD's don't have to be bought in whole and songs can now be mixed to create whatever compilation one may like. While I'm still not totally comfortable with this model, many are tolerant of it. But hold the phone because now they want to raise prices!

Whatever the arguments against piracy may be, it has always in my mind been the one true check against the RIAA and their attempts to control what the public will buy and at what cost. As revolutionary as this was, it was still much quieter than the music industry would have most of us believe. For all of their bitching and moaning, the music industry still made billions of dollars and cried that they were losing mere pennies when compared to how much the industry still generated from CD sales. Piracy in one form of another has existed for a very long time. And while efforts such as Napster and Kazaa brought it closer to the average American than it had ever been before, most of America was still too stupid to figure it out.

File sharing was truly a revolution, but one in its infancy stages yet to gather its full strength. But the music industry knew such a day would one day come, so what do they do? Well, after they got through suing ghetto kids and grandmas for illegally downloading music, they get in bed with a certain company named after a fruit and start their own service. They slap together a hip and cool ad campaign, get Bono from U2 to be a spokesman and convince the American public that this is the true revolution (First Metallica, and now U2 - I can' take this). The same people from an industry that churns out the same cookie-cutter bands every year is now telling us what is hip, cool and revolutionary. Well, if most of America was too stupid to figure out the one piece of leverage they had, why should they be expected to be smart enough to figure this out?

And now that they have a legion of followers, they are all set to raise prices. And why shouldn't they? Don't expect corporations in a capitalistic system to behave morally. They exists for one purpose only and that is to extract as much money from the consumer without breaking the law (most of the time anyway).

And before I get this post deleted for having a political slant or for advocating piracy, let me state for the record that I have not and do not currently practice the latter. But for the reasons stated above, I don't exactly bemoan its existence. Perhaps more important in regards to file sharing is not piracy, but rather that it gave to the regular person a mode of music delivery that the industry could not control. We live in an age where radio stations are pre-programmed and focus groups determine who the next big star will be. No longer do bands rise up through the ranks of clubs and venues, gaining in popularity amongst the people. While this aspect of file sharing networks was never fully realized, I had at least hoped that it would be the beginning of more musical revolutions to come. But now we will probably never see such days again. For those of you who were around for Dylan or the Seattle scene, cherish the albums and memories you have because you will never see that again.