Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
Legal, yes... cheap? Not really.
Look at Steam for a distribution platform that has drastically dropped prices through digital downloads. Sure, games cost the same as retail boxes initially, but nowadays you can get stuff like Mass Effect 2 for $5 if you catch a sale. Before digital distribution, it would maybe drop to $30 before you wouldn't find it in a store.
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You can't compare the two directly, old software has always depreciated faster than old music (which arguably goes up in price with inflation).
I'd say $10-12 at iTunes is far better than $20-22 at HMV - however there are tons of factors to take into account that are outside the scope of this thread to be sure (physical vs digital, lossy vs exact, etc).
What is almost indisputable though is Apple's role in increasing bitrate and dropping DRM on music - maybe some other company would have accomplished this, but in my opinion, without the overbearing success of the iPods and the iTunes Store as the big stick to beat the music companies with, we'd have had a morass of incompatible DRM schemes and been worse off overall.