Apple’s $1.8 billion iTunes tax

adamb1000 And you base that assumption on what? Steve Jobs' long history of treating his customers well? Apple's well known penchant for charging their customers less than the maximum the market will bear?

The $0.30 upgrade price for taking a song to iTunes Plus made sense when it was created: you had a $0.99 song and wanted to change it to a $1.29 song (without DRM and with higher quality. It certainly doesn't make sense now for songs that are (going to be) $0.99 in the improved format. And I doubt we'll ever see a $0.30 cent rebate for songs that are upgraded to the new improved format and the new improved $0.69 price. But I plan to wait until Apple says that all the changes that are going to be made have been made (they haven't said that: they've said something like "by April"). Then I'll look at upgrading the songs (and probably will). We do live in an instant gratification world, don't we? And, of course, it may turn out that it will still cost $0.30 to upgrade when the changes are all done, regardless of the new price of each song. In which case annoyance is justified. And yes, I can afford to be relaxed about this: I don't have a large collection of iTunes songs, and I stopped buying music in any form except direct from the few artists I know (or the nice locally owned record store that buys the CDs directly from one of those artists). I'm really not happy with the music industry (including Apple) (and most of today's new "music" would not be accepted here if it came with a $10 bill attached). I relented recently: I did buy a Zune Pass (3 months), and will no doubt convert the 10 songs per month to purchases. Whether I renew or not is an open question to be answered in the Spring.

It's so funny how the writer of that CNN article trys to justify this by saying this is cheaper than what we all went through when we went from tapes to CDs. You can almost see him mentally trying to fight off the Apple fanboy urge to just buy into anything they sell and come up with a way to justify spending the $56.70 to upgrade ALL his files. You just KNOW he can't win that fight and he will sadly break down and just pay his Apple tax like a good little brainwashed sheep. Thank God for the IRiver and the Zune…

I thought I read that the labels made that necessary. Plus...someone has to pay for the bandwidth of re-downloading all those songs.

And Paul lies again. Why did Paul leave this line out? From the same website he quoted from: >>But it looks like **the labels** prevailed in sticking it to consumers on one last point. Anyone who wants to upgrade their entire existing iTunes Library to DRM-free versions of the same songs, can conveniently do so with one click. But it is going to cost you 30 cents a track to do so.<<

BTW, I'm going to re-post that every time someone blames Apple for this.

If you DON'T think this is at the insistence of the labels, then you are just proving your jackassery. Jesus. Paul, Mike, weedmonk and the rest could even find a way to blame Apple for the war between Israel and Hamas. Do you honestly think that a company that held out for so long to avoid variable pricing, would adopt the scheme merely to dick it's customers? By God Apple better have all the kinks worked out on day one, while MS can take 18 mos to get Vista right.? Surely piecemeal upgrading is coming, and if it doesn't? Big frickin' whoop. Upgrade or don't, it's your choice, just like every other chance to spend YOUR money. Me, I'm not gonna, because I have never felt "restricted" by DRM.

>>Do you honestly think that a company that held out for so long to avoid variable pricing, would adopt the scheme merely to *** it's customers?<< This. >>This sort of post looks desperate. << Double this.

Paul www.rif.org Ocean pretty much just handed your @$$ to you:)

My solution...keep my zune pass at $15/month. I can plug the zune into all of my home and car systems and listen anywhere...plus I get 10 songs per month for free. Even DRM free ones. I like it. But, again...if somebody wants to spend the money to do the upgrade...let them. That is their right. --tayme

I have about 300 songs that I bought from the iTunes store for 99 cents. They have DRM and are 128K AAC. I knew that when I bought them, and I've enjoyed having them. iTunes allows me to keep them under the original agreement, and that seems fair. Apple now offers me the option of upgrading my songs to 256K AAC and remove the DRM for 30 cents each. That seems reasonable to me. But please keep harping about how awful and sneaky this is. I just don't see it.

@boyreinvented: Apple was not the first vendor to convince the labels to sell DRM-free music. Amazon's been doing that for a while. @daProject: Apple could've provided a conversion tool that would have cost them a fraction of the cost of that bandwidth. This is definitely just another way Apple loves to grab cash from its happy customers.

Mike. This isn't a case of fanboys making things up. It's the truth. What's funny is the Microsoft fanboys like yourself that are desperately trying to use this to hit Apple fanboys with. The reason that Apple didn't offer DRM free music was that the record companies were using DRM free music to try and boost sales at other outlets. They hate Apple almost as much as you do and were desperately trying to get people buying elsewhere. Well that's failed, they've given up and finally let Apple have it's way. Apple is not a perfect company by a long way, but honestly, this is one time when attacking it, just makes you look silly. Save your rants for one of those days when Apple really does something really bad. This certainly isn't one of them.

edgesmash Actually, Apple doesn't even need to do that much. All they'd have to do is change the pointers in the database (the one that keeps the records of what customers have licenses to what media) to point to the non-DRM, higher quality versions and tell customers that the next time they refresh any tracks they own, they'd be getting the new, higher quality, non-DRM version. No massive download bill, little to no changes to client code, trivial changes to the servers, savings from not having to keep both formats stored on Apple's server farms.

I find it funny to see how mikegalos and others here, including Paul, rush to say how evil Apple is at every opportunity. Come on people...if people are happy with thier iPod or iPhone how is that harming you? I just don't get this and it gets sillier every day. Both sides are equally guilty of this. Look at robertsjoe and others posting thier juvenile BS whenever somebody says something positive about Microsoft. At least its entertaining, I guess...but even that is starting to fade. All of you that have either flavor of the company provided bliners on here are very simple minded individuals. --tayme

I don't think it is the Music Labels that are giving in to Apple but the reverse. The Music L ables have been happy to sell DRM music for quite some time (look at Amazon). It was Apple refusing to allow variable pricing that was preventing DRM music hitting iTunes. Apple have now caved in on that so iTunes can have DRM free music in order to allow them to tackle Amazon's growing market share.

I was wondering what all the MS water-boys on this site thought when MS decided that people that bought music for Plays-For-Sure music players were told they would have to repurchase there music in order to have that music play on a Zune? http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/12/microsoft-rebrands-playsforsure-to-ce... http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/11/30/6133 http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=plays+for+sure+zu... I guess getting screwed is a relative term. Talk about zealots, fanboys & delusional hacks.

@Mike: Listen to yourself! It's hilarious and totally tragic. At the end of the day, Apple is a company. A corporate entity not a charity. Do you honestly think that if things were reversed, Microsoft would be letting people upgrade their libraries for free. If you do, well you must be living in a dream world! @Alan: You don't get it at all do you?! The music companies have refused to let Apple sell DRM free music because they wanted to encourage sales of DRM free music from elsewhere. They hate that so many people use iTunes, because they hate someone else having control over them. This isn't some conspiracy. I'm already starting to wonder if you guys are just fanboys or total whackjobs and I've only been posting for a day.

boy You're the one claiming that Apple is totally altruistic and that evil external forces are making them have to do this bad thing that they'd otherwise never want to do. And, of course, that we should believe everything you say because it's "the truth".

Last April iTunes music store surpassed WalNartand became the biggest seller of music, online or otherwise. It is still gaining marketshare and sale volume. @mikegalos: Care to explain how iTunes Music Store can be defined as "non-competative"? Looks like it's busines model work pretty fine to me.

Actually I tell them to buy songs from Amazon after browsing on iTunes.

@Mike: I don't know what planet you live on but here on Earth those 'evil external forces' certainly exist in the form of record companies and their RIAA. These people sue the less fortunate for vast sums of money, so let's not pretend they are all nice and lovely and don't care about money. Oh, I used the word "truth" and you are never going to let me forget it, but all the time you just use that instead of creating a real argument, you'll just look petty and pathetic. I certainly don't think Apple are perfect. They do plenty of things to piss me off and OSX has some really irritating features and flaws. Just like Microsoft and it's Windows OS.

boy So, now that you've admitted that Apple is just another business, go back and explain your argument that Apple couldn't be the ones responsible for or profiting by charging a roughly 30% fee for removing the "DRM feature" that provided absolutely no benefit to the customer in the first place.

@Mike As a business, if a supplier was charging 30% for something, then it wouldn't make sense to just absorb that cost. It makes sense to pass it on. That's what Apple has done. The DRM was there because of the supplier, not the retailer. Where is your argument?

Lots of good content in this thread. Even sir Mikey can see the error(s) that Paul is committing. This is the day Thurrott came to equal Dvorak.