iTMS Relief

I was glad to see that Apple finally got the iTunes Music Store launched in Canada. A lot of people were making a big deal about them missing the launch date, but I could care less. I'm just happy that now I can get high-quality tunes in Canada. The majority of my MP3 collection is ripped from my own CDs, but there is a good percentage (probably 20-25%) that were downloaded. Nowadays, since just about everyone is downloading (and sharing) music, there are a lot of low-quality rips plaguing the sharing networks. Combine that with some teenagers’ ability to hook a microphone up to their machine and put a “secret message” in an MP3, and you really do have a good case for buying from the iTunes Music Store in Canada. My relief comes from the fact that they're selling songs for $0.99 CDN. Yes, when taking the exchange rate into consideration, that's cheaper than the US iTunes Music Store. If it were any more expensive here, nobody would even bother with the service. “A buck a song” is pretty easy to sell, especially when many Canadians are buying $1.25 coffees every day from Tim's. First of all, there isn't anything solid written in Canada yet (that I know of, at least) that says file sharing is totally illegal. Nobody's been sued here yet, and no court cases have taken place to find anyone guilty of sharing. Furthermore, we already pay a tax on blank CD and DVD media, and a tax ($25) on the iPod that supposedly goes towards covering copyright infringement costs. Essentially, file sharing is a gray area in Canada, and most people operate under the (likely false) assumption that it's okay. Now, we have the iTunes Music Store selling tracks at $0.99 a piece. Why should anyone consider buying a song in Canada, when it's not technically wrong to be downloading music here? Here comes my argument: It will save you a lot of time and headaches. When I listen to a song on the radio, I seem to rarely hear, or even remember, the name of that song. I have to search around my radio stations' websites, read the Top 50 list, look around on LimeWire, download as much of the list as I can tolerate (there's far more noise than signal on the radio), and hopefully I'll find the song I want. Then, after downloading the song, I'll listen to it all the way through, and 90% of the time I'll find a glitch. Either an annoying skip, an encoding error, or some punk kid recording a message over the track. Three or four downloads later, I may have a decent-quality version of the song. Sometimes, after all this hassle, I end up with no song, since all the copies I can find are terrible. This can take up to an hour to acquire 2 or 3 songs, at best. If I'm charging myself $40/hour to develop software (a conservative rate), I just lost $40 when I could have acquired the same result for $3, and saved myself most of that time. I thought the “downloading scene” was getting better when BitTorrent files were becoming more prominent, but what tends to happen is that you will end up downloading every single album by an artist rather than a handful of tracks. Not only are you ending up with 100x more than what you wanted, but you're still not safe from the glitchy recordings. I think that anyone using BitTorrent to acquire their music will start to suffer from the hoarding syndrome real quickly. When you're out buying a 200GB HDD because your music collection is getting too big, you're in trouble (unless you rip everything in a lossless format, of course). ;) Fellow Canadians, please stop the insanity of wasting your time downloading crappy copies of music, and get your butts over to the iTunes Music Store to buy some songs. I trust that you will find the experience far more user-friendly, and maybe you'll find a lot of great music at the same time. Kudos to Apple on finally getting it north of the border! Now I just have to find a good monthly budget I can stick to for buying songs… :D