What are iTunes doing?

An update on the earlier moan about iTunes pricing...

Today is worse folks. I went into iTunes Store this morning. Not 79p but 99p a track at iTunes store. Check it out. Most of the top songs have gone up another 20p. (WAS 99c in the USA = 59p) but today it's also gone up to $1.29 a track - at today's rate that's 79p folks (not the 99p we Brits pay). 

The Brits are almost paying 20 percent more for the same downloads. Face it, we are losers. We get shafted on petrol prices, music, tobacco, booze, car pricing, everything is begga bucks in the UK compared to many countries. Who do we think we are? Switzerland? Yeah we have the overheads but not the standards. We just lie down and take it. Suckers. Someone, somewhere is making a mint out of us. The Americans wouldn't take it. Why do we?    _| :-)   <--- my attempt at "loser".

Music industry shooting themselves in the foot.

In iTunes, hidden at the very bottom right there's a union jack flag. Click on it and you can choose your country. I chose USA hee hee. iTunes USA charge 99c per music track. Converted at today's rate that's 59p a track. They charge us 79p for the same track. Uh? What's the extra 20p (or 34 percent) for??? Because we are stupid and don't complain like the American public? No wonder they are talking about the demise of the CD. I remember in the late 1980's I bought CDs in LA and they were about £5 each whilst in the UK at the time they were £13.99.

Now 20 years later they are saving the manufacturing and distribution costs of CD's by placing them on-line for us to download. A huge saving for them, but not much of an incentive for us. We are told we can keep one back-up copy (at our own expense) No colour booklets unless we print them out (at our own expense). And they are still charging £8 for an album that has cost them hardly anything to market. May they all suffer from free downloads. Theivin b'stas are whingeing that they are not making any money due to free download sites. They would love to shut them down so they can greedily grab the entire global market for themseves.

It's not as though the artists get much out of the deal themselves either, it's the fat cats that run the entire music machinery that drive their rollers etc... moan moan 'kin moan. :-0 x