With I-pod sales through the roof, I- tunes making tons of money, but music industry and labels losing tons of money, so they say. Labels and I-tunes will be working out some sort of deal. With some re-negotiations on artist royalities for digital downloads, also with the Beatles, Led Zep, Metallica all heading towards digital downloads, labels are worried that they actual CD will be obsolete which in the end will make the CD stores obsolete. So to combat the raise in royalities and the industry loss, Itunes will be raising prices of downloads, also the availabilty of certain tracks will now take much longer and some will not be available seperately. Now if you are like me, and still need the actual CD or some physical item, this is good, though I have an I-pod for almost 2 years I have never downloaded/purchased a full cd, and about 5 songs overall. But if you make your day downloading from I-tunes be prepared for a slight raise in price, though the time hasnt been discussed yet, some said 10.99-11.99 to match stores, also expect this raise in stores like Best Buy and chains that have been losing money on cds by charging 9.99.

i like the idea of download kiosks in wrecka stows...i'm downloading more and more music these days, but i will pay for a CD if it's some kind of deluxe reissue or if it's by an artist whose album packaging is always top notch. i do think a liner notes file needs to come with downloaded albums, speaking of packaging. i like knowing who played on what, and i love lyrics sheets. i miss that when i download stuff.

I will buy cd's for as long as they make them...

iTunes

iPod

Save yourself some keystrokes.

Source please.

CalhounSq said:

Me too.

Scorpion said:

Me too. I hate the compression on mp3s.

Not long ago Apple announced it had reached agreements with the record labels and said they would not be raising prices. This was about a couple months ago.

CinisterCee said:

not that this would, or should, change your mind: http://www.pocket-lint.co...ewsId=3756

In many cases, their albums often cost more than the CDs in stores (especially when they first come out). Yeah, they do trap people with the singles but something tells me that if they go up (aren;t they already the most expensive of the companies?) this will just give more attention and sales to their competitors (and their reasonable MP3 players).

I usually buy the cds and them I rip them to wma (It's better than mp3 IMO)!

Then I store my cd in a closet! Strange but true!

Both 3131 and COAF where played once on my cd player...

Stax said:

See... I would be glad to download a 320 kbps mp3 or a .wav


I guess what I don't like is download time.

There's no excuse for iTunes or any digital download store not to offer wavs. The only one I know of doing this at the moment is www.beatport.com, mainly a dance music outlet.
[Edited 7/29/06 9:55am]

Seriously, if people are going to freak out about a raise in price, they would probably be better off: just downloading the songs from free sites, or borrowing friend's cds and ripping them to their computer.

Or just buy the CD in the bargain bin a year after its release, or amazon.
[Edited 7/29/06 10:09am]

jjam said:

You may not like the excuses, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Even ignoring the DRM concerns of the record companies, that would increase bandwidth usage and download times (roughly) tenfold.