iTunes and Music
I bought an Apple iPod a few weeks ago, and today, I returned it to Best Buy for a full refund. The reason was simple: Apple announced new iPod models today, and for the same price that I paid for a 20GB a few weeks ago, I could now get a 30GB with all the new features. Pretty much a no-brainer, if you ask me.
The first thing I want to say about this is that I think Best Buy (and Circuit City) has an admirable return policy. 30 days is a good amount of time to get familiar with a product and truly decide if you like it. Too many times we're forced to make buying decisions on something based on a spec sheet or others' experiences; this doesn't necessarily tell you how much you're going to like it. Plus it's nice to have the price guarantee, and (in this case) protection against the remorse that comes with buying something and then seeing it updated a few weeks later. This is one case where being a huge mega-coporation gave these companies the power to do something useful and good for the consumer. Now I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of the super corps vs. the mom & pop shops... but in this is one case where they've used their power well.
The second thing I want to address in this entry is the new iTunes business model presented by Apple today. The gist of it is that you can now download music for 99 cents per song from this website. This is a pretty good model, I think, for most of the masses out there. Me, personally, I will probably continue to refrain from buying music online because the quality just isn't there, in my humble opinion. The reason I go out and buy a CD is because I've heard the song before; maybe on the radio or in a movie or whatever, and I like it enough to want to hear it on my stereo. Most of the time, I don't pay attention to the little nuances in quality. Certainly not when I'm listening to music while doing something else, whatever that may be. But I am one of these people who actually sometimes sit down in front of the stereo just to listen to music. And for those times, no mp3 or any other compressed format I've heard thus far, is going to cut it.
Along those lines, I haven't really been too happy with the offerings from the major record labels lately anyway. I read in one of the articles announcing Apple's new venture that CD sales have been down 7 percent in the last year, and the RIAA is blaming online music piracy. Well, I'm not going to speak for piracy here, but I'll tell you why I haven't bought a CD in a while: TODAY'S MUSIC SUCKS! I was listening to some of my old CD's, from the 80's, and some music from the 60's, and one thing that this music had that is just plain missing from today's music is content. I mean, the drivel that comes out of the recording industry machine today numbs my mind. Maybe they want it that way... hell, it seems to work fine for some people. But to me a good song is great musical composition, plus good lyrical content. Bonus if it's a socially or politically responsible theme. There's been so little of that lately. It makes me sick to see these artists making money for putting out crap... you know who I'm talking about.
I think we took a couple of good steps today with this iTunes thing today, though. If anything, I think this model gives the consumer a little more choice because they are able to purchase one song at a time. I would probably like to see some option where you could get the full 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo PCM data (the data that you get on the CD) for an extra 50 cents or something... but it's a good first step.