The Customer is Always Wrong

[The Jade Knight]

http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/guide/

Your guide to DRM subscription services.

My recommendation?  Avoid them.

[Spriggan]

Well good luck finding a legal sites that don't use DRMs, unfortunately they're necessary due to all the thieves out there.

[The Jade Knight]

Actually, if you bothered looking at the article, you'd notice that it lists four legal sites that don't use DRMs.


Anyone got any guesses at what percent of that 99¢ you pay to iTunes actually goes to the artist?

[Spriggan]

Probably as much as they get for a single song on a CD which is very little, artists get most of their money from concerts and promotional events.  My guess would be $.09 since apple gets about a third of the money and the music label gets the other 2/3s.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

You would be right sprig. Although from what I had read Apple does give the artist a taste from their share too.

[The Jade Knight]

I'm not aware that they do, Jeffe.

And it may be noted that the Label actually takes a chunk of that 9¢ (it's somewhere right around there) for production costs, which are, indeed, "charged" to artist royalties.


You'd actually be doing the artist a favour if you downloaded a bunch of music "illegally" and then sent the artist a check worth 25¢/song, rather than buying the music off of iTunes.  And you'd get higher-quality, DRM-free music, to boot.

[Spriggan]

Well there's no point in having anything about 128 bit-rate unless you've got a SONY or one of the creative's and a few other non-apple MP3 players since most have such horrible sound on them you wouldn't notice a difference.

[The Jade Knight]

iTunes wont work on most mp3 players.


And I happen to own a Creative with 98db SNR, and wonderful sound quality.

I rip mp3s at insanely high quality (128-360kbps LAME VBR).

[JP Dogberry]

LAME VBR.

Anything else is NOT worth using.

And RIAA are the only thieves.

[Spriggan]

iTunes wont work on most mp3 players.

I was makeing a blanket statment dealing with most online music stores not iTunes in general, should have stated that though.

[stacer]

What's DRM?

[stacer]

Um, nevermind. I have now read the article and have no more questions.