British consumer group Consumers' Association has raised its voice over the iTunes' pricing in the United Kingdom. Most notably, its anger is aimed towards the different pricing model Apple uses for its online music store in European countries. In other European countries where iTunes operates (France, Germany), a downloaded song from iTunes costs €0.99 -- equivalent of appx. £0.67 -- while Brits pay £0.79 per song.
Consumers' Association says that iTunes pricing model could be against European Union rules and asks Apple to stop "ripping off" British consumers. But Apple defended its UK pricing by stating that "underlying economic model in each country has an impact on how we price our track downloads. ... We believe the real comparison to be made is with the price of other track downloads in the UK."
Then again, CD and DVD prices vary wildly between countries -- just like average salaries, rental prices, car prices, etc do.
Source: BBC
Then again, CD and DVD prices vary wildly between countries -- just like average salaries, rental prices, car prices, etc do.
Source: BBC
These puretracks, which you may be familiar with as they were recently offered as free givewaways with a MacDonald's Big Mac Combo, seem to originate from a central-distribution base, and are in fact, in protected .wma format.
In my case "Bonfire" is simply a 'front-end' leading to the 'puretracks'. I believe there are other services which lead to the same overall pool of puretrack songs.
I've purchased about $100.00 Can. so far, but will unlikely be buying anymore.
With "Bonfire", you can purchase prepaid music cards in $5, $10, and $20 denominations right at the Future Shop (consumer electronics) store. Many songs cost .99c + taxes, but many cost more. Purchasing an entire album's worth of songs does not necessarily lead to a discount, as is often supposed. (Whether purchased individually or en masse, the songs comprising an album cost the same.)
My Main Problem: Often, my downloads are automatically aborted before the song-download is complete. This is highly annoying on a dial-up (modem) system.
'Bonfire' uses it's own download manager. This manager displays all the songs you have purchased in a queue, with a progress indicator for each song. I can't tell you how many times the song in question is reported by the manager to have downloaded _fully_, but is _in fact_ truncated (cut short), requiring a NEW download, manually initiated.
You are only allowed to download each song two times. If, on the second attempt, the song is truncated again, you have to pay to download the song again. That's unfair, and wasteful in both time and money, and tells me that their download manager needs re-vamping.
You can also do the "Right-click-&-Save-As" thing, but you will still occassionally get incomplete, broken downloads.
Another Problem - The PrePaid Cards: Every time a purchase is made, it's value is deducted from the value of the card, (whose serial number you have keyed-in previously.)
The trouble is, you will always be left with a small plus balance on the card which you can't use. After using up the bulk value of the card, there will eventually be a small sum left over - an amount which is slightly less than enough to purchase another, single song. (Or else you would have bought the song, right?)
I enquired of their customer service link, if there wasn't some way I could 'pool' all of my unused card balances into one, so that I could get all that I paid for, but they said 'No.' (You cannot pool together all of these small sums together to buy a new song, unless you also use an additional credit-card number, (which kind of defeats the whole idea of 'pre-paid' card, right?). If you buy and use a lot of these cards, it becomes a rip-off of sorts - more profit for the service.
And so, if you use this service, you will lose a little bit on each card used.
That, combined with the rather high incidents of partial downloads you will receive (and possibly have to RE-Purchase), I won't be participating anymore. As I say, these download services seem to be a bit 'buggy'.
These protected .wma 'puretracks' sound fairly good in the world of lossy compressed-songs (I didn't really notice any unpleasant artifacts), but burning these tracks with Win Media Player 9 series, to a true red-book CD-R, was a labour of love, fraught with glitches (I *was* eventually successful but not without using a major, undocumented 'workaround'), but that is another story too large to include here.
If you don't think (as I do) that these services charge too much for their wares when everything works smoothly, you will by the time you lose enough money in 'unused card balances', and re-purchase enough tunes that didn't come through the first time.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled News Updates........ 
