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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1? Remember when you were forced the buy the whole album for just one song?

The biggest issue is and always will be accessibility and ease of access and these two are hindered by outdated global licensing agreements.

If you sell be a DVD with DRM that takes longer to start playing than a copy I downloaded. I will download it. If you force me to watch unskipable 10 year old ads before I can play my purchased DVD I will pirate that movie.

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> How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1?

I can't think of any that stopped honestly or even owned an Apple product. Apple products are expensive.

That's not really relevant to the question asked there: You don't need to own an Apple product to buy music trough iTunes.

If you wanted just that one song then iTunes was very much the most affordable, and accessible, way to legally buy digital music back then because it only charged you $1 for a song.

The only other alternatives where, often legally rather obscure, flatrate subscription models or buying the physical full album, which would usually have cost you at least $20+

Valve did something very similar with Steam: Very easy to use and it actually passed on the savings from digital distribution to the consumers by heavily discounting the prices of games.

Yep exactly! I personally don't find Apple products useful but man I love iTunes just because I can buy DRM-free music.

I wish buying movies was this easy.

I tried iTunes on Windows once. Horrendously clunky UI, not at all what one would have expected from the vaunted "intuitive" Apple.

> That's not really relevant to the question asked there: You don't need to own an Apple product to buy music trough iTunes.

I wasn't aware that iTunes offered downloads via a website back then, because iTunes certainly does not run on the OS which the people that I'm thinking of used at the time (and still doesn't).

Nowadays at least in my country is difficult to find music legally to download and burn on a CD. My car stereo only has CD, and I don't want to change a very good stereo (it sounds far better than the built in stereo of most new cars) just to put one with bluetooth so I can play Spotify, and I don't want even to use the AUX input, since the quality is not that great (it picks up a lot of noise) and most importantly I have to use the phone to change track (and that introduces a distraction, I prefer not to use my phone when I'm driving).

Nowadays it's impossible to find mp3. I have a Spotify premium account, so I can download music, but not in a format that lets me burn it on a CD. So basically I pay 10 euro a month and I don't even have the freedom to listen to the music on whatever device I prefer.

I miss the old days where you could find everything to pirate. These days thanks god there is Telegram that lets me download some mp3 in decent quality, otherwise I have to download YouTube videos and the audio quality is awful (but probably most people will not notice since they have crappy stereos in the first place).

What country is that? While the focus for sure has shifted to streaming, here in Germany e.g. Amazon will sell you files if you want.

I think the number of countries where Amazon sells MP3s is nor very high. They've never sold them in Canada for example.

Seems like there's a lot of countries where Apple doesn't even operate the iTunes Music Store too which is surprising to me. Like Albania and Iceland.

> Nowadays at least in my country is difficult to find music legally to download and burn on a CD.

It's weird how at the same time the lack of option to legally download and burn CD and the lack of optical players "if there is no way of legaly watching the content piracy is the only way. (and importing expensive DVDs in an erra where literally none of my devices have optical bays is not actual option)" lead to the same conclusion: pirating.

> I miss the old days where you could find everything to pirate. These days thanks god there is Telegram that lets me download some mp3 in decent quality, otherwise I have to download YouTube videos and the audio quality is awful (but probably most people will not notice since they have crappy stereos in the first place).

Amen to that. Just yesterday I bought two tracks from https://christophertin.com/projects/civilizationvi.html (it's not the link I used, that one led to gumstore something which allows me to download FLAC tracks) and today I can't even find the store link.

I tried to buy in the same way the whole album but there are no "download" options.

Every albums/EPs has different streaming options but there are no download options for everything.

I ended up using youtube-dl on the music.youtube.com and I can clearly hear the differences. I suspect these tracks are amputated from some instruments or settings.

> How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1?

Apple does not allow you to "buy" music, only to rent it.

Why am I being downvoted for stating an undisputed fact? Do you feel good about yourself for promoting misinformation and downvoting factual corrections?

"Back in the day" you did purchase music from Apple. This changed to a subscription now from what I understand similar to Spotify and Google.

Please provide source for your claim.

There is a wikipedia page for the iTunes Store which details the history of various ways the licensed/sold things over the years.

Yes, I have looked at the Wikipedia page for the iTunes Store. It does not claim that, at any point in time, iTunes terms would have allowed you to buy a copy of a song. They only sold you the right to listen to a song for undetermined amount of time. If you have a source that claims the contrary, please link.

So they sold you a pure audio file with no DRM, but that somehow was only intended to be a totally unenforced "right to listen to a song" they had no mechanism to terminate?

I checked and it turns out that I was wrong. You are correct that iTunes did at one point in time offer the ability to download copies of songs without DRM and without (significant) contractual limitations regarding the usage of those copies.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090106080722/http://www.apple....

> (xii) iTunes Plus Products do not contain security technology that limits your usage of such Products, and Usage Rules (iii) – (vi) do not apply to iTunes Plus Products. You may copy, store and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use.

The same limits apply to a CD or DVD purchased. You own the song.

You can still buy DRM free songs from iTunes...

It's easy to use web search and see that iTunes let you buy music. The point of the statement you're reacting to stands even if buying music from iTunes isn't possible anymore.

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