The iTunes Music Store is a really useful thing to have around. It’s reasonably priced for single tracks, and as long as that’s all you’re after, it’s a great way of ensuring you get hold of a reasonably high-quality copy of your desired track quickly and with the minimum of fuss. No more messing around with dodgy P2P applications only to receive a blippy, dropout-ridden mess time after time!
Of course, it’s not perfect. The fact that you can buy a real, physical CD album for only fractionally more than you can download one from iTunes is a disadvantage, but not a major one. After all, if I was locked in the house and for some reason needed to play Dark Side of the Moon three times backwards to escape, the ability to download it on iTunes would seem quite handy. But that’s the only situation in which I can see myself doing it.
There’s one huge disadvantage though. There is no way to re-download the tracks you have purchased. You have to take care of them after the initial download, backing them up and re-importing them in iTunes as you move from computer to computer. Now here’s the major problem: the tracks are DRM’ed (Digital Rights Management’ed) to stop you naughtily passing them on to your friends. So surely… if some catastrophe befalls your computer, even if you have copies of these magical music files, won’t the same mechanism stop you using them? Aren’t you a bit bummed in the face?
Maybe not. I’m sure there’s some clever “associate my music library with this account” trickery available in iTunes. But I don’t think it’s reasonable, or sensible, to expect the user to keep backups of their music files. Of course, anyone who doesn’t back-up their documents is asking for trouble, but music files? Hardly top of the priority list.
You can freely delete your ripped music files and simply rip them again on your new computer - why not allow iTunes Music Store purchases to be re-downloaded? Buying something digitally is patently not the same as buying a physical item, and as such it is difficult to think of them in the same way. If you lose a CD, you know it’s gone. If you lose a computer file you downloaded, there’s got to be some way to download it again - right? Right? I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this way. But in iTunes’ case, I’d be wrong.
Curse you Apple, curse you.
