Price Complaints (Score 2)

I really think some people here are missing the point of this offering. This is, if it materializes anyway, the first service that provides a painless, legitimate means of getting quality digital music with a minimum of DRM. Say what you like about Dictator for Life Jobs, the user experience is critical to him, and I am fairly certain they will not bring an overly encumbered system to market with the Apple logo attached.

As far as cost, .99 cents is beyond cheap. Remeber, most "CD Singles" are 3.99 or more, and it's basically one popular track, and filler. Egad, it may cost $12-$15 to get a whole cd - and most of those who complain about it are ones who have forked out $150 for a bigger hard drive to store their MP3 collecion......

Moreover, has anybody tried to buy any CD that is not on the Billboard charts lately? $19 for a SoupDragons CD is par for the course, and I dont even want all of it!

And some of you complained about other costs... like media... Media! Oh my!!, $.12 a CD, Maybe $.50 if you go with the ultra high end media. What next, are you going to start amortizing the cost of your broadband, processor and RAM into it? Get over it. If you are reading it here, these are not real costs for you.

Further, .99 (or whatever) gets you one thing, at least, that KaZaa never will. It gives you guaranteed consistent quality and availability. I cant tell you how many songs I have from the various P2P services that:

• a) sound like they were recorded in a machine shop from a badly eroded 8 track,
• b) have clipped beginnings or endings, or are so poorly compressed that you can't listen to them on a good speaker system without cringeing.
• c) are completely the wrong song.
• d) get remotely queued for 2 days

That is what your *GASP!* $1 a track gets you, along with accurate and complete ID-3 tags, and consistent and CORRECT naming.

There will ALWAYS be a market for KaZaa and its ilk... I was a starving college student not all that long ago, and $1 a track was a lot when I could go get it for free, but now, I dont mind paying a little bit for convenience and reliability.

$1 a track, for no headaches, no bad copies, no spyware, no hours spent rewriting ID3's and sorting and deleting bad and truncated songs is not a bad deal for me, and probably not for a lot of other people.

And as always, if it sucks, it wont work. Its the American way, not all great ideas are successful, but all the lousy ones go broke eventually.