I have mixed feelings about iTunes. I like it as a music management application, but I do not like it as a music store. Why don't I like the iTunes Music Store? Read on...
There are several problems with the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). The first is price. Yes, 99 cents a track is cheap. This makes it useful on a 'singles' basis. I firmly believe that buying single tracks from ITMS has become the new 'singles' market. In the old days you would go into the store and buy a single track on either CD or tape. That way you wouldn't have to spent the $10-15 on a CD if you only like one song. Now you just go to ITMS, spend a buck and you have the song. The problem is, what happens if you DO want the entire album? Whenever you buy an album on iTunes, all it does is basically buy all the tracks from that album at 99 cents a piece. Multiply 0.99 times the number of tracks on a CD and you can easily top $12-15 for a single album! The more tracks on the CD, the more expensive it is. This is completely opposite the way it works if you buy the CD in the store. These days, most CDs can be bought for around $10-12 in the stores. That price is no matter how many tracks are on the CD. It could contain 5 tracks. It could contain 500 tracks. It doesn't matter. It's the same price. This is where iTunes is lacking. I can kind of understand the need to charge 99 cents for a track if you are buying a single track. After all, you are buying these tracks with a credit card, and there are per transaction costs for processing credit card transactions. However, if you are buying an entire album, that is still a single credit card transaction. There is no need to build in that extra cost into every track on the CD. This is one reason, I am in favor of switching iTunes to a variable price model. If you are buying a CD, it should be possible to discount the price considerably. This discount should be relative to the number of CDs you are buying at once. If you are buying a single CD album, sell it for $7. If you are buying a 2 CD album, sell it for say $12. If you are buying a 10 CD audio book, sell it for say $30. Apple needs to undercut the music stores for prices of entire CDs. This move would greatly increase the already large number of tracks they sell. If they did this I might even consider buying CDs. As it is now, ITMS is more expensive than buying a CD in the stores. What's the point in spending more to buy something on ITMS when you get less? You don't get a CD (a convenient storage medium for the music if nothing else), you don't get the liner notes, (which often contain the lyrics to all the songs - a nice feature), you don't get a nice CD case. You even get a lower quality recording on ITMS versus the CDs you buy in the store...
This leads me to my other problem with ITMS. The music quality is greatly inferior to the music quality of the same song purchased on a regular music CD. Most ITMS songs are recorded at 128kbps. This is considerably lower than the recording rate of a music CD. I've had long discussions with a musician friend of mine. He doesn't understand why so many people would buy what is clearly inferior music from ITMS. The quality of the music just isn't there. I believe that the reason that ITMS tracks sell so well is that they are 'good enough' for most people. Most people, myself included, would not even be able to tell the difference between an ITMS song and a song directly from a music CD. A musician would. Apple needs to start increasing the recording rate on their tracks to at least 192kbps. I suspect that this would be relatively easy for Apple to do, on a going forward basis. As I understand it, Apple doesn't actually 'rip' all the songs to music files that it sells on it's service. Instead it provides software to all the music companies to do this. This means that all the music company has to do is feed music CDs to this program and it 'rips' the CDs to music files. These music files are then sent to Apple for posting on the site for sale. All Apple has to do is change the default encoding rate on their CD 'ripping' software to a higher bit rate and then ship this out to all the music companies. From this point forward, all new music would be ripped at the new, higher, default bitrate. I imagine something could be arranged to re-rip the old tracks too.