Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Apple Math.

You have got to be goddamn fucking kidding me.  Yeah, Apple announced yesterday that they'd start removing the drm from the itunes store.  (big deal)  And there were whispers that you could actually remove the crippling restrictions from music you already actually own.  Well its true, kinda, and here's the deal.  Itunes is now iTunes Plus (which means that they're higher bitrate files without DRM) though apparently iTunes Plus music is 30 cents more than iTunes (minus?).  So if you've got a buncha iT- songs that you actually paid to own, you can just pony up the difference to Apple and they'll swap them out for iT+ files!  AMAZING!  not.  I'm not really sure how many audiophiles are rocking crappy white earbuds, but I'm betting the majority of people are just looking for unlocked meadia, not modearate increases in bitrate.

Lets, see, if I can burn about 22 songs onto a CD and can burn and rip a CD in about 12 minutes, I could process about 110 songs an hour.  At 30 cents a song that's $33, minus the cost of 5 blank CDs, $32 an hour.  So unless you'd be making more than that sitting around scratching your ass (I'm assuming you're not taking time off work to do this) its not really worth converting to iT+.  Added bonus of the ripping method, you've got an extra CD to give to your ipodless friends, old school P2P style.  (otherwise known as the mix tape)  I haven't heard of the RIAA tracking anyone down for lending CDs to their friends yet.

Also, remember that Amazon sells DRMless music for between 79-99 cents every day and emusic.com's plans average out to between 40 and 26 cents per track.  Apple is late to the party and all they brought was a half-full bottle of creme de banana.  Puke.

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