I've been waiting for this day for a while. And it's .99 cents a song here as well (there was some speculation it would be over a dollar). I've already purchased a song... couldn't resist.

lol, good for you.

if you feel like crossing the legality barrier then go to suprnova.org

Ehn, I'm not really concerned about the legality of it all, I'm just happy to finally have the OPTION to buy from iTunes. Especially for artists that I truly want to support without going out and buying the whole album.

For example, there have been many PJ boots that I really only wanted one or two songs from and would happily pay cold hard Canadian cash to acquire in order to support the band (even though the PJ boots aren't on the Canadian store... yet. I hope that changes though).

.99 US?

If not, I'll be able to treat songs like prescription drugs, exchanging my currency and buying them in bulk at the lower Canadian prices. That is, I would do that if I didn't just download for free all the time.

No, Canadian.

Shit, is that more or less than .99 US? I always get mixed up with what canada's monies are worth. Eh?

It's 83 cents here.

Why would you want to pay for a lossy version of an album/song, with DRM, when the real thing is pretty much the same price?

You're basically telling record companies to continue ripping consumers off.

Only now instead of rediculous CD prices they, are now doing the same with downloadable songs. The tunes cost them $0 to produce in terms of a physical product, instead they give you a lesser quality version of a song and tell you what you can do with it, while at the same time charging nearly the same amount.

Actually, the iTunes proprietary M4P format is a lossless format. So that kinda blows your argument out of the water a bit. So the only thing you dont get is the artwork. Quite a lot of people like the idea of only paying for the songs you want to hear instead of buying an entire album of songs that only half of which you might like. And then there is the convenience factor of not having to search around. And on top of that, I have found some cool hard to find songs on iTunes that were very hard to find anywhere else, and in some cased the actual CD's were very expensive because they were hard to find, but with iTunes you dont get that markup.

So my question is, why wouldnt you want a service like iTunes? It's really what the music industry should have done right at the beginning of the whole music going digital boom.



Just because there is no physical product doesnt mean there are no costs. There's the amazingly huge amount of storage space needed on computers and servers to house all the data. Basically anything included in infrastructure and upkeep costs them money, and the people they have to pay to do it. And the artists themselves still get a cut remember. So .99 cents a song doesnt seem all that unreasonalbe to me. Heck, people pay that much at some jukeboxes for one song that they only get to hear once.

i don't know why anyone would pay for downloaded music in canada since they ruled it completely legal, i mean i don't pay here where it's illegal... i only pay for cd form

Downloading mp3s is not a crime in Canada...

Proprietary is the key word there, not to mention the whole DRM nonsense. And .99 is still ridiculous even when considering hardware and bandwidth costs. Let's not forget the fact that they are ripping off the uneducated consumers by selling them DRM infested mp3's in the first place.

I suppose if you enjoy dowloading singles itunes is great, but as for albums, I'd rather buy the real thing considering the price is essentially the same.

Given the number of people who still exchange mp3's via free p2p networks, it would be a very stupid business model to not include Digital Rights Management in their product. As far as being proprietary, I've been able to convert iTunes files to .aiff files easily and burn them to CD.

I look at it like this. If I want to get 10 songs by different artists I like and put them on one album, it would cost me $100+ to buy all the CD's containing the songs or I could d/l them off of Kazaa and risk having the RIAA come after me...or I could pay $10 from iTunes and get them all in one place with no hassle. Makes perfect sense to me. No, I wouldn't buy an 'album' album off of iTunes.

soulseek is better