James Delahunty
7 Jul 2007 17:11
With the growing success of services such as iTunes, more consumers are turning away from record stores and buying their music online instead. However, it can be a costly habit when your equipment is stolen or somehow destroyed. Buying all your digital downloads again could be very expensive and chances are, even if you have insurance, your "digital possessions" may not be covered at all.
Of course, it always makes sense to make backups of your digital data, but an event such as a house fire would most likely destroy the backups too. For many users, a digital music collection might be the lowest priority after losing many possessions in a house fire, but since some collections are hundreds or thousands of tracks long, it helps to have an insurer who definitely covers them.
A UK unofficial consumer watchdog, Which?, recently released a report that showed out of 46 insurers, less than half covered digital downloads in their policies. It is believed that up to 24% of music downloaders have had their entire digital music collections lost one way or another. Amongst the companies that do insure digital downloads, there are some differences.
For example, Churchill Insurance covers up to £1000 of downloads in addition to the cost of repairing the host computer whereas Privilege Insurance will cover up to any value of digital downloads. However, whilst Churchill will take download claims "in good faith", Privilege demands receipts or some other form of proof of ownership of the music downloads.
Any offer is better than none though, and many insurance companies are slow to adapt to how consumers are changing their digital media buying habits. Zurich and JS Insurance are two expamples of companies that don't cover digital downloads at all.
Source:
Reg Hardware