Re-download charges?

There are reports of Apple *sometimes* allowing people to redownload their purchased content due to a hard drive crash, etc. However, the terms of their service clearly state this is not what is promised and there are plenty of reports of them basically telling people, "aah, too bad", back up next time".

Short answer: back up or roll the dice.

If the item is on your iPod with iTunes 7, there is now a transfer purchases option to get things back into iTunes.

As others have said, protect your purchase: Back up. Similar to how you could keep a purchased CD from getting damaged, protect your digital purchases as well.

...after all you could'nt (and I'm sure you would never think of) go back to HMV for example and say "Umm, I lost my CD can I have another?"However, one of these is a physical media object that cost actual money and materials to produce, ship, stock, and sell originally. The second is a set of data that exists on completely reusable media devices and costs less than $0.02 per album to deliver. One of the things that makes something like Audible, Stardock, and even something like the Yahoo! subscription service, attractive is that you can download and download and download and download and, oh yeah, download the same things as many times as you need to. Audible and Stardock continue to let your re-download your purchases even when you have no ongoing subscription with them. So, while I know Apple's stance on it, it's by no means a logical stance, merely a greedy one further compounded by corporate laziness (c.f. the screwups with iTunes plus upgrades when the current file "version" is different than what you purchased originally).

However, one of these is a physical media object that cost actual money and materials to produce, ship, stock, and sell originally. The second is a set of data that exists on completely reusable media devices and costs less than $0.02 per album to deliver. One of the things that makes something like Audible, Stardock, and even something like the Yahoo! subscription service, attractive is that you can download and download and download and download and, oh yeah, download the same things as many times as you need to. Audible and Stardock continue to let your re-download your purchases even when you have no ongoing subscription with them. So, while I know Apple's stance on it, it's by no means a logical stance, merely a greedy one further compounded by corporate laziness (c.f. the screwups with iTunes plus upgrades when the current file "version" is different than what you purchased originally).

I don't disagree with you and believe me I am the last person to be pro iTunes store ! (read my previous posts with my complaints about it)

but then again Apple has to pay per license too... also if they see a way they can make more money they will. Remember it's our choice to purchase from the store... A choice which I now think I should never have made because of 'DRM' (but that's another subject entirely)

I don't disagree with you and believe me I am the last person to be pro iTunes store ! (read my previous posts with my complaints about it)

but then again Apple has to pay per license too... also if they see a way they can make more money they will. Remember it's our choice to purchase from the store... A choice which I now think I should never have made because of 'DRM' (but that's another subject entirely)

It's no that, I don't think. I think the license applies to the sale, not the download. It's the kind of bandwidth -- which costs Apple overhead money -- that would be used if people used the iTunes Store as their own sort of massive network hard drive, deleting things willy-nilly to free up hard drive space, knowing they can just grab it again whenever. Other stores' subscription models cover that, because you have to keep paying every month, anyway, whether you download music or not; but with Apple you could buy a $1,000 worth of music, then never buy from them again, but keep if they had an open restore policy, you could download all those songs again a couple times a month every month for years. Before long, Apple would have actually lost money on every track you bought.

How are you basing your numbers. I have no idea how many times a download would have to occur to eat all their profit on the track. I have heard Apple say their margins on tracks are very, very small.

And rather than bandwidth, I should have written "delivery overhead" -- that's everything: bandwidth, server traffic delays for other buyers, the whole works.

But you then propose a security service where you propose charging a little more the service of re-downloading a certain number of times. There was a rumor going around almost a year ago that Apple planned to introduce an iTunes Premium service for something like $10 per month that would allow unlimited re-downloads of purchased tracks. No such service was ever launched, but I'll bet the rumor was based on actual plans under consideration, perhaps still under consideration, by Apple.

As for the other subscription services, it's not what you *can* download for your monthly fee, it's what you *will* download over the life of the service. For subscriber that downloads a hundred tracks a week, there are 10,000 -- this a hypothetical ratio; I don't know the actual numbers -- who download one track.

I think basically we agree, that such an iTunes open re-download service would fairly come at an extra price to cover extra overhead. But I don't know how much it has to do with greed or laziness as it does the iTunes sales model: you bought it, it's real property -- with some DRM restrictions, of course -- and if you lost a CD, you wouldn't expect, say, Best Buy to replace that for you for free, either.

The issue isn't that it could be abused, it certainly could, but there's value in not being quite so hardheaded as Apple. You'd have to download a track at least 30X before Apple would have chewed up all their profit on it. So, allowing people to redownload, say, 5X inclusive to each purchase and then a redownload fee of, say $0.10 for another 3X downloads would still protect their profits while keeping everybody happy. Heck, it could create its own service where people felt their purchases were protected and, if you didn't mind paying, a long term delivery service.

The issue isn't the bandwidth. As an example, you mention subscriptions, well, so what. They'll let you download 5,000, 10,000, or more tracks onto every computer you have as many times as you do a fresh install of the service - and that's for the same annual cost as Apple would charge you for about seven albums. The bandwidth is trivial compared to the cost - it's laziness and greed that prevents it.