I just wanted to express my disappointment with your recent rate hikes on certain songs. I was always skeptical about online purchasing of music, but your trademark 99-cent cap is what won me over. Now that it seems you have thrown that out the window, I will no longer be purchasing music through your medium.
Instead I will be joining the masses disappointed I tune users back to Best Buy and other music stores that have managed to stay afloat. I would rather not stick around to watch 1.29 rise to 1.49 than to 1.89 and so on. I may end up paying a little more in the end but it comforts me greatly to know I have a physical hard copy in my possession that can not be accidentally erased or is extremely difficult to transfer to a new computer when your old system is dying out. For what its worth, I did enjoy the convenience of the download however my experience with digital downloading is over. I will attribute this to the greed of the Beatles and their feeling that their crumby old music is worth more than a buck. It’s not.
Thank you,
David M

Coolfer had an article about the change saying that top downloaded songs that were upped to $1.29 dropped several spots on average, but that, with the price hike, the amount of profit didn’t decrease. I think where they’ll see the loss is in $.99 songs, in people outright boycotting the service or cutting down on their purchases or not knowing whether a song is going to be $.99 or $1.29, so they’ll go straight to another vendor where they can be sure (Sony really fucked Amazon in that way). Or they’ll just learn to use torrents or any of the other dozens of ways to find pretty much any song that’s ever been recorded for free.

It’s a knee to the groin of the people who have been keeping the industry afloat by acquiring things legally… the vaunted $.69 tracks are few & far between, hardly encouraging catalog sales.

The industry should collaborate on a textbook called “How not to do PR.”

its almost a no one win for the customer, if they happen to use certain internet services that is in cahoots with the music industry, to report those downloading illegal music/movies and whatnot.

all i can say is, that itunes, is practically handing over their customers to the competition. the ipod i bought last year, is the last ipod i will ever buy. i have my reasons, beyond just a price increase.

what really is annoying, is that you are paying all this money for a song that can only be used for mp4 and not mp3s.

who wants to spend more money just because a song is popular….i guess the zune will be getting more customers along with rhapsody….the only thing probably keeping itunes from completely failing and losing all its customers, is that, $1.29, is still an improvement from having to go to the store to purchase a cd for 13 dollars, only to like 1 or 2 songs.