Buying Songs from the iTMS

On Sunday, May 21st, I bought music from the iTunes Music Store for the first time ever. I had been holding back from buying because I am opposed to the copy protection that iTunes uses, the prices are a bit high, and I dislike the way the music publishing companies run their business (setting unfair usage limits, taking away ownership from the original authors, overcharging, lobbying for stricter laws, etc). This time I had finally found an album that I felt was worth buying. The artist goes under the name "Bassic" and he had previously given away several tracks of his electronic music on MP3.com which I downloaded in 1999/2000 and liked very much. Furthermore, he does not appear to be under the thumb of a major publisher. On iTunes he had his 1991-2003 complete collection of 89 tracks for $49.95. That works out to 56 cents each track, but still $8.76 per hour of music.

Bassic's music was a long time coming to the Canadian iTunes store; I had seen Bassic's collection in the US iTunes store a year ago and wondered why it took them so long to get it on the other
countries' stores. The bonus is that the Canadian price is cheaper than the US price: they charge $49.95 US ($56.18 at current exchange rates).

It took almost 2 hours to download the 5 hours and 42 minutes worth of music. Then I started the task of removing the iTunes copy protection. I burned the songs to CD rewriteables and copied them back to my harddrive in a lossless filetype ("FLAC" format) for archiving. I also converted them to unprotected MP3 files for regular use. It was a time-consuming procedure, as I had to manually re-input the track titles and other metadata. I probably won't be buying any more songs from iTMS for a while.