Debbie Does Missing Tracks…
That brother o’ mine, Thud, has waxed eloquent recently on his problems with Apple’s iTunes Music Store. A lot of his complaints are valid, but I have to admit that I’ve been kind of hooked on its convenience – even with my consumption of its DRM and streaming-rights-limited product meaning that I was helping to funnel still more money into the music industry’s system of reducing artistic achievement to little more than data on discs of plastic to be sold at exorbitant prices to consumers who are treated not as valued customers, but as either sheep to be fleeced or thieves to be jailed.
Excuse me while I catch my breath.
I guess the fact is that I simply never considered DRM that much of a hassle – like most consumers.
Let me tell you what I do consider a hassle, however – not getting what I paid for.
“But, Glen,” you might be saying (if you have a habit of responding out loud to blog entries as you read), “you aren’t getting what you paid for already when it comes to DRM. What about fair use? And Betamax? And the greed of the RIAA and its member companies?”
The point is that when you factor in convenience and value, you tend to think in terms of getting the music and listening to it – not in terms of the limitation of your rights as a consumer. So despite my political and artistic objections to the RIAA, I would probably continue to be a customer of the iTunes music store.
What bugs me, however, is when I spend money and I don’t get what I pay for.
One of my earliest complaints about the iTunes Music Store was the high number of “Partial Albums” it sold. These albums are listed in the store, but when you click on them you discover that they are only a selection of the albums.
Thankfully, these albums are labeled (“Partial Album” – easy, no?) and don’t feature a “buy album” button.
Or, so I thought.
I recently purchased the soundtrack to Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical (yes, such a thing does exist) from the iTunes Music Store. I enjoyed it thoroughly. When I hit the last track on the album, I was greeted by the voice of the actress playing Debbie inviting the listener to sing along with the included Karaoke tracks.
That would be the entirety of the eleven-second final track of the album as purchased from the iTunes Music Store. There are three songs missing from the iTunes version of the album that can be found on the CD as purchased from an outlet such as Amazon.
It has the announcement for the karaoke tracks, but is missing the karaoke tracks themselves as well as the much-lauded “Bonus Track #69.”
What bothers me is that the store has no indicator that the album is missing tracks, and it features the “Buy Album” button.
Now, granted, the album cost just slightly over half what I would have paid for the CD. The CD, however, would have included liner notes and would have been a physical object without DRM on the individual tracks and in a non-proprietary format, allowing me to also deposit these songs on my old Nomad as well as my new iPod. I considered the reduced cost a fair exchange for giving up those aspects of the purchase – not as an indicator that I might not get the entire album as promised.
What does this mean?
Well, probably nothing. I’ll probably continue to use the iTunes Music Store the way I have in the past because I’m weak and I like inexpensive music delivered quickly and legally. And because Napster, Rhapsody, and other music services online have yet to make their services Mac compatible. I am a devoted Mac user – even if I’m a little disappointed in the iTunes Music Store right now – and see no reason that I should have to change my operating system to use a competing service. (And before anybody tells me that Napster and Rhapsody are simply doing what Apple is doing with the AAC format – no, they’re not. Apple has made software available that allows AAC files to play in a Windows environment. Cutting out competitors in the portable player market is vastly different from cutting out an entire segment of the desktop computer market)
On the other hand, I still can’t figure out why I haven’t signed up for Yourmusic.com, yet (link is not an affiliate link).
But I’m probably going to be a little more hesitant to recommend iTunes as a source for music now, and I’m going to double-check every album that I purchase to make certain that I’m getting all of the tracks that are actually supposed to be part of it.