| Thursday, March 29, 2007 |
13:30 - The march of progress
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Well, here's something they should have done a long time ago:
It's seemed faintly silly since day 1 to me that a feature like this didn't already exist. I mean, it seems like it would be a pretty common use case, doesn't it—the customer buys a single track a la carte, which is allegedly the whole benefit of buying music online rather than on CD, and then once the customer decides he likes that music enough, he goes back and buys the rest of the tracks. But that either means painstakingly buying each individual track from the album (which at 99 cents a track adds up a price usually higher than the $9.99 standard album price), or buy the whole album, which means you get a second copy of the track you already had.
How dorky is it that iTunes can't keep track of the music you've already purchased, and mark it as such in the interface, like with a grayed-out button or something? Or, to ensure that you can download something again if you really need to (like if you lost it), maybe just make it a different color?
But for that matter, this is a database, for crying-out-loud... all your downloads are carefully linked to your account, and you can review all your past purchases in the account management section. What on earth prevents them from giving you the ability to re-download something you already purchased? They know you already paid for a given track. It's right there in the database. The track hasn't changed; it's the same as it always was. The DRM is still keyed to the same set of computers. So what's the harm in allowing someone to download it again, without having to go plead with support and make a convincing case that you need and deserve to be granted leniency on their "backups are your responsibility; if you lose your music, tough luck" policy? What, indeed, is wrong with them having an "unlimited downloads" capability for items you've purchased—something you've bought shows up with a green button instead of a silver one, say, and you can always come back to where you got it from and download it again?
Hell, that would alleviate the whole problem with movie purchases and the space they take up both on your regular hard drive and on your backup media: once you're done watching it, just delete it. You can always download it again later. iTunes itself becomes your own personal storage and backup system. (Lord knows they've got a better backup system than you or I do.) Wouldn't that solve everything? What's the downside?
Bandwidth concerns on Apple's part, sure. I know I wouldn't want people re-downloading a 1GB movie file over and over again just because they can. But c'mon—couldn't you maybe charge a 10-cent re-download fee or something? Amortized over all downloads from all users, I'm sure they could recoup the added costs. And imagine the goodwill it would foster.
They'd probably sell even more stuff through iTunes, if people were to start buying tracks just to see the buttons change color—"Turn the whole store green", to coin a phrase. It would encourage completism, just like this "Complete My Album" feature appears to do. Hell, even the labels would like it.
Awesome as I think iTunes is, it's certainly got some baffling quirks. I'm sure they've got a good reason for going to such great lengths to prevent people from even thinking about downloading their purchases more than once. (Schoolmarms who scold you about not backing up your stuff don't grow on trees.) But I'd sure like to know what it is...
... Or, then again, maybe the question is simply "What took them so long?"
UPDATE: Stephen Rider draws a sensible conclusion from this, for the benefit of the "Steve's just grandstanding about DRM" naysayers:
One of the things I’ve noticed about Apple’s handling of its dealings with the music industry is that they never want to do anything until all of the Big Four labels are on board with it. They probably made this deal with the labels one at a time, but they didn’t want to go to the public and say, “You can buy the rest of some of your albums!”, as that would A) confuse consumers, and B) rub it in the faces of the labels that had not yet agreed.
It’s probably a similar situation with allowing DRM-free (i.e. unlocked) music. Surely some of the independent labels would allow unlocked music, (and in fact much of the indie music you can buy locked on iTunes you can buy unlocked on other web sites), but Apple is not going to make that change until all four of the big boys agrees to it.
It's a user-interface thing.
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Brian Tiemann
