Dec 12 2006
Itune Sales Are Falling and DRM May Be to Blame
Interesting article at The Register about falling ITunes sales. One analyst suggested that the problem is the DRM which prevents the song purchased at ITunes from being played on another device. A complaint I made about Sony’s Reader and its proprietary ebook scheme.
Sales show that more people are buying CDs than digital downloads. The overall music industry is in decline by nearly 20% and those declining CD sales are not matched by digital purchases. Norah Jones and EMI are releasing digital downloads that are free of DRM and therefore not attached to any particular device.
The issue of piracy exists, of course, and perhaps industry response will be to tighten the DRM but I think that would be the wrong tactic.
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Dec 13, 2006 @ 12:19:37
Now that I have iTunes, I RARELY buy a hard copy CD. However, there are instances where iTunes won’t release certain songs as singles where I won’t buy the whole digital album. Actually, that may not be Apple’s decision, even though users tend to blame iTunes in the site comments. Anyway, I think if I could buy more single songs, by more offered artists, I’d probably never buy another whole hard copy CD again.
Dec 13, 2006 @ 18:21:26
I buy cd’s because iTunes and other sites will not provide the higher (better Quality) bit rates I typically can get from buying the CD and ripping it to go on my 60 gig iPod. With that much disk space I want full tilt best quality copies on the thing since I am not trying to keep all my music since that’s why I got a 200 gig hard disk on the Mac.
If they would let us buy 160 AAC format off the site I might do more than try out one or two songs to decide if I want to go buy the album.