Why iTunes Has Lost My Sales

I have to start out saying that I’m extremely disappointed. I’ve been a fan and supporter of Apple for some time now. I bought an iPod, like much of the rest of you did. I’ve push people to the iTunes Store for music. I’ve even recommended their computers.

Recently Apple has started throwing around Cease and Desist letters to anyone who thinks about stripping their DRM. While removing the DRM is problematic and against terms of use, this is what I have to say about it.

DRM, for those of you who don’t know, is an acronym for Digital Rights Management. In a nutshell this is to keep you, the person who _bought_ the music, from spreading the music around the internet. They lock the DRM down to five computers which is all checked through their servers at runtime, when you play the song.

The issue with Apple’s DRM is that they don’t play well with others. This means that those of us with Linux, for which they wont produce and iTunes client, or with Zunes, etc. cannot listen to the music we have _purchased_. To me this is a huge flaw in Apple’s design.

Now, there were tools available at places like The Hymn Project that listed tools to help you strip that DRM so that you could listen to your music anywhere. These projects allowed us, the users, to be able to listen to our music when we wanted and where we wanted, this hurts Apples business model. Thus, Apple sends a Cease & Desist order the site owners to remove all links to DRM stripping tools. =\

The reason this hurts Apple is that people are forced to buy their music products such as the iPod if they want to listen to their songs elsewhere. Removing the DRM allows a user to remove that requirement and sales decrease. Personally I like the iPod, even though it is a bit buggy, better than the Zune. I think that Apples brand is nowhere near in jepardy from DRM stripping and that they need to remove their stranglehold on the consumer.

Because of this, I’m boycotting the iTunes Store. I should own what I’ve purchased and downloaded. I should also be able to play that music wherever I want. I will be using Amazon Mp3. Hope to see you there.

Image from coryshaw.com

Haven’t posted in a while…

Well, it’s been a pretty long time since my last post so I felt I should kick off this one with somewhat of a transitionary… I guess what I mean by that is something that semi describes what I’ve been doing in my spare time.

Well, today I finally hopped on the bandwagon…I bought an iPod. I didn’t buy one of the iPod Touch’s. When I got there I compared it to one of my friends iPhone’s and it was really…lacking…the screen was different with contrasts off and so forth…not to mention only 8GB of space. So instead, I decided to go with the 80GB iPod Classic. Similar to the old iPod Mini’s, but with the video built in and some upgraded software. I’m pretty pleased with it so far. We’ll see how I feel in the morning…Can anyone say “buyers remorse”? Nah I think it was money pretty well spent since I’ll use it quite a bit.

Beyond my inquiries into the iPod, I’ve been busy playing WoW. Yes…yes…I know… My response is, “It’s not an addiction…it’s a lifestyle…”

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Ok well maybe not, but even so. I enjoy the game. Plus there are dev. aspects to it…if you enjoy developing with LUA… I got into LUA a bit back in the day, but have recently stayed away from it. However, I’ve heard reports of Warhammer Online using LUA…so maybe it would be worth my time to venture on in.

I haven’t forgotten about the oo3D project that I’ve got listed in my projects page. However, that may take a back burner for a little bit as a friend and I may delve into the world of XNA on the .Net platform with the intentions of writing a game for the 360. We’re still in the conceptual stages right now. If and when this gets off the ground I’ll post a bit more about it. Until then it shall remain a mystery.

I believe that covers most of the technical things I’ve been doing. I certainly want to get back on the dev train outside of work so I will be hacking things around again real soon. I’ll keep you posted.