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Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on their Pulse tour.

My worst nightmare becomes true

This post is all about the new iTunes store. And no, I didn’t pick the title because it’s bad, I picked it because it’s so good. Better don’t ask me about my iTunes bill at the end of the month.

Over at vowe’s we have been moaning for quite a while about DRM and how it prevents people from buying music online. soundmedia.ch lets you download DRM free music for quite a while already, but only locally famous Swiss artists are to some extent available. With the arrival of iTunes Plus another barrier has been broken. Finally buying digital music is the way it is meant to be: easily available, properly tagged, superior sound quality, fast downloads and playing anywhere.

My experience with the iTunes Plus store had only flaw: despite my DSL connection being perfectly fine, it took me three days to download my songs because of repeated interruptions. My guess is the Apple servers were too busy as lots of customers hit the new service (John’s comments seem to confirm my assumption). After three days I had my album downloaded except for one song that mysteriously disappeared leaving only the playlist entry behind. The repeated download interruptions and my Powerbook going to sleep obviously messed things up. However, some nice iTunes staff person answered my complaint within 48 hours and enabled my account to download the missing song again. Today I downloaded the Pulse album by Pink Floyd and didn’t experience any lags anymore.

So there my worst nightmare has come true: almost every album by Pink Floyd is available without DRM - and once I’m done with those, Iron Maiden is waiting… Apple has the skill to suck money out of their customers’ pockets without having them regret it. I just wonder why it takes the rest of the industry so long to grasp a good business model.

(PS: The Wall is the only Pink Floyd album not available as a DRM free download, it still has the DRM chains. Some people at EMI don’t seem to have that much courage yet)