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99 cents a tune is way too much. I can buy a CD with 15 tracks for $13, and it has to be pressed out of real plastic and the ucard has to be printed and the whole thing packaged and shipped to a store where the manager gets a salary and pays light, heat, and insurance bills and some pierced kid will get paid to wait for me to walk into his store so I can buy it. That's a bunch of overhead, and you have to add in the royalties and production cost and advertising.

Downloading the same tracks to an iPOD would cost more and the record companies don't have to pay the truck driver or the store manager or clerk. Where does the extra money go?

The music industry reluctantly agreed to this deal where they get huge profit for putting the tune directly on electronic media and bypassing working folks?

And hey ipod downloaders, what do you do when the drive fails on your little white box when you have 6000 $0.99 tunes on it? Got insurance? What's the MTBF on ipods?

Ipods are great, love it, love music, but there are other issues to think about. Like why the tunes cost more than real cds, they should cost $0.40 or so.

99 cents a tune is way too much. I can buy a CD with 15 tracks for $13.

I thought the same thing until I realized, when I was burning my CDs to MP3s, that I only wanted to keep two or three tracks on most albums. The rest was just filler I didn't want. Thus, if I buy 15 tracks online for $15, it will be much cheaper then buying the 5-7 CDs I would have to buy to get 15 tracks that I really want.

Of course there are albums that are worth buying because most or all of the songs are good. I will still buy those CDs but the days of paying $13 for a CD with just a couple of songs I like are over.

You don't have to buy your music from iTunes. You can fill it with nothing but regular MP3s if you want.

And yeah, you should back it up, just like you back up any other hard drive with important, valuable data on it.

You're right about the cost, though; almost all the money goes to the record companies. Apple makes little to no profit from the Music Store. It only exists to support the iPod, and so Apple will have first-mover advantage if and when the record companies ever get it straight in their heads that they'd probably sell five times as many songs if they cut the price in half.

The whole point is that you don't have to buy the 10 crappy songs if you only want a couple good songs for an album. If you want he whole album, great, go and buy it. You can easily rip it to AAC or MP3. No one is pointing a gun to your head saying you HAVE to buy it at the iTunes store.

Now onto your uneducated statement of "And hey ipod downloaders, what do you do when the drive fails on your little white box when you have 6000 $0.99 tunes on it? Got insurance? What's the MTBF on ipods? " Easy - you go to your computer and all the music is still there. With HD prices well under a dollar per Gig of storage, you'd be pretty silly to ONLY have it on the iPod.

I realize you are just a hater, but at least come up with something that is actually wrong with the iPod.

And hey ipod downloaders, what do you do when the drive fails on your little white box when you have 6000 $0.99 tunes on it? Got insurance? What's the MTBF on ipods?

Here's what I would do if my drive failed. I'd simply restore the data from my backup hard drive, where my music files are mirrored. If, in the crazy event that both my hard drives failed at the same time, I'd simply dump the contents of my iPod into my new hard drive. And if something really crazy happened, like if both my hard drives failed and a truck ran over my iPod all on the same day, I would simply buy a new iPod and a new hard drive and then I would restore the songs from the original CDs and the backup CDs I have of all my purchased songs.

And before some smartass posts here to say that you can't dump the contents of your iPod onto your hard drive, let me say that YES YOU CAN!

There are dozens of programs you can download on the web that will unlock the hidden directories on your iPod so that you can move the music on it back onto your computer. The only reason Apple does not support two-way downloading is because the record companies made them do it so that one couldn't go around with an iPod "selling" music. But of course, young kids with lots of time on their hands have developed progams that will bypass that protection and unlock your files. While Apple can never officially sanction such programs, lest they incur the wrath of the RIAA, you can bet that they smile about it behind closed doors.

99 cents a tune is way too much. I can buy a CD with 15 tracks for $13, and it has to be pressed out of real plastic and the ucard has to be printed and the whole thing packaged and shipped to a store where the manager gets a salary and pays light, heat, and insurance bills and some pierced kid will get paid to wait for me to walk into his store so I can buy it. That's a bunch of overhead, and you have to add in the royalties and production cost and advertising.
Downloading the same tracks to an iPOD would cost more and the record companies don't have to pay the truck driver or the store manager or clerk. Where does the extra money go?

That's cheaper if you really WANT all of those 15 tracks on the CD... most CDs have only a couple of tunes I really like, the rest are garbage, as far as I am concerned. You can also use iTunes to rip your $15 CD and put the tunes on your iPod...