Apple v.s. CDs.

It’s no secret that the death of the CD is near and anyone who has ever owned an iPod is to blame.  The cheapest iPod now only costs £40, so pretty much anyone with a few CDs can compile their music on to one device (especially as iTunes is free!)

I haven’t bought a proper CD for at least a year and the last full album that I bought on iTunes was only £7.99 and the same album was more than £10 in HMV. 

So why would I spend over £10 for an album that I can buy on iTunes for £2 less?  I am definitely not someone who wants the CD to die or wants iTunes to die because they’re both great.  First of all, the CD is a physical thing, you can hold it in your hand and when you buy a CD, it feels like you own something proper.  Whereas on iTunes, whatever you buy e.g. a song, an album or a film isn’t a physical object.  If we stop buying CDs and iTunes just takes over the music market, could films go the same way?  Will we all be buying our films on iTunes soon?  I really hope not.

However, isn’t buying DVDs and buying music on iTunes just a little hypocritical?  It may well be, but iTunes’s film downloading system is a bit strange.  First of all, you can pay £3.49 to rent a film (Cars 2) or pay £9.99 to buy it.  What’s the point of renting it?  That’s why Blockbuster is going west, people don’t want to rent a new film for one or two nights anymore, they want to own it. 

Of course buying music and films on iTunes (and other similar services) does come with the obvious problem of ‘what if your computer’s hard drive crashes?’  If this were to happen, then all your music would be lost, this isn’t so bad if you’ve imported your CDs on to iTunes because you can just import them back again, but what if you’ve only ever bought music on iTunes and the computer dies?  You might never see that music again.  However, it is now possible to transfer music from your iPod to iTunes, so maybe the computer giving up the ghost wouldn’t be so bad after all.

I’m still in favour of physical CDs, but they cost so much more than albums on iTunes and on iTunes you can buy individual songs, so if you only like 4 or 5 on an album, you can buy those and not have to buy the CD with all of the other songs on and basically waste your money.

Finally

How many of you have bought a CD and put it on your iPod?

How many of you have listened to that same CD on a CD player after importing it on to iTunes?

Just think about that...