The Apple Music Store opened today. You can buy and download songs or albums directly from Apple into iTunes. They’re marketing it as a good alternative to stealing them from (Napster-of-the-month): reliable, higher quality, legal. They’ve got a lot of music there, even though they’re missing The Dead Kennedys, Ani Difranco, Red Elvises, Weird Al Yankovic, and George Carlin (so far as I’ve discovered!).
Of course I’ve already got a suggestion – well, several, but this one I wanted to share with y’all.
When I insert or burn a physical CD, I’d like iTunes to register that I “own” that CD. I should be able to then buy the electronic version of the CD from the Music Store at a (significant) discount, say about $2.00. I own about 300 CDs, some of which are scratched. I’d like to avoid reburning them all or accidentally rebuying them (or losing them in a house fire, etc.).
I also think this would be a good way to define my rights to this music which are now somewhat unclear (if I buy a CD and it melts, do I have to buy it again, or can I get a new copy? etc.). And there are a lot of CDs I own, that I wouldn’t mind discarding/destroying if I knew I had rights to a digital copy. If you had this program, I would have purchased several dozen album e-licences today, and would probably eventually convert my entire library (or rather, the disks that the Music Store offers, of course!)
Issues: this would make it possible to pirate CDs by physically sharing the CD (or a burned exact copy). It would make “used” CDs (currently questionably legal) more valuable. I would solve this by encouraging users to either mark or destroy physical CDs that they’d e-purchased.
This would truly revolutionize my music listening – as iTunes already has!
(Another interesting thing for html junkies: when you put in a tag like this:
it takes you to the customer request screen of iTunes (requires iTunes 4.0. And a Mac, of course!). Hmph – wonder what else I can make it do? I’m just starting to learn about external program href tags – seems to me like an opportunity for trouble.)
Now, how do I filter the store for Explicit lyrics only?