[scottjl]

Originally Posted by Charbax

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.

does lala.com offer the same catalog as itunes? no. and stream systems are not the same as owning your music. you're comparing two different things.

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 What itunes does is enforce the old outdated scheme of intermediaries robbing artists and consumers of their money.

maybe you should take your complaint to the record companies, not apple.

Only recently apple got forced to un-drm their contents, and there is an extra fee to purchase non-DRM on itunes last I checked, which probably means most people still bought DRMed versions on itunes.

actually if you read up on the history of itunes, jobs was against DRM from the beginning but the only way he could get the record labels to go along with it was to add the DRM. jobs fought for years to remove the DRM and eventually won. apple was not "forced" to remove their DRM. again. check your facts.

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. 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.

i'd hardly say you're representative of "all people using the internet" yourself. and again, you have no facts to back up any of your rants here.

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.

apparently you aren't aware of how corporations work. they are out to make money. plain and simple. and last i knew, no one forced me to buy an ipod, an iphone or any apple product.

plain and simple: don't like apple's products, then don't buy them. move on. the only thing you show us here is that you like to rant without facts to back up your opinions.