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Originally Posted by dmaul1114
Huh? At least for music, iTunes prices are pretty fair. About the same as most other stores,
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lala.com is 10x cheaper (probably why apple wants to shut them down), last.fm, spotify and others are totally free to stream, napster/rhapsody and other offer unlimited music streaming for about $10 per month.
Out of $1 per song, 30% goes to Apple, 65% goes in the pockets of record companies and less than 5% goes in the pocket of the artists. That is absolutely NOT fair business! With an online based content service like itunes, there should be NO intermediaries, the artists should get the absolute bulk of industry revenues. What itunes does is enforce the old outdated scheme of intermediaries robbing artists and consumers of their money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dmaul1114
all the music is DRM free.
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Only recently apple got forced to un-drm their contents (to try avoiding anti-trust lawsuits), and there is an extra fee to purchase non-DRM on itunes last I checked, which probably means most people still buy DRMed versions on itunes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dmaul1114
And discounting it's use to people because of Piracy is silly. I've never pirated anything, and never well. I've also bought very few MP3s as I prefer CDs, but I've never illegally downloaded a single song.
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You are not representative of all people using the Internet. More than 50% of Internet bandwidth is used for BitTorrent transfers. More than half of ipod users are below 30 years old, they don't spend a dime on itunes, you can be sure of it. Apple makes all their revenues on selling hardware. ipod/iphone represents 60-70% of Apple's overall revenues (more than macbook/osx). itunes revenues for apple are less than 5% of their yearly revenues and probably that a lot of it covers bandwidth, infrastructure costs and taxes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dmaul1114
I think stealing digital content is the same morally as stealing a physical item (...) decent human beings who don't just steal all their content.
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Decent human beings don't force people to use their proprietary hardware/software/content lock-ins, they don't make more than $3000 in revenues from a product that costs $150 to mass manufacture in China (the iphone), they don't take 95% of itunes/kindle revenues to intermediaries instead of giving 100% to authors/artists as digital distribution is supposed to.