Editorial - You can't snap an MP3 - unless it's on iTunes


As a child, one of the favourite pop records of my Dad's that both I and my younger brother loved was a song by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, penned in 1963 by Lennon & McCartney and a British number one hit, called 'Bad To Me'. One of a rash of 'Merseybeat' singles, borne of the Parlophone, Brian Epstein and George Martin stable, it also reached the US top ten the following year, the first Beatles cover to break the US top forty.

I would imagine my father bought it sometime in the summer of 1963. By the time my brother and I got our sticky hands on it I suppose it would have been the mid 1970s. We both loved the song a lot - enough for my brother to take it to a friend's house when both were aged about six to listen to it there. My brother came back crying - his friend, Paul, had accidentally sat down on the 7-inch vinyl disc and broken it. It would be years before we got round to finding a replacement. If a thing like a record gets broken, that's it - you can't take it back to the shop and ask for a replacement unless you're prepared to pay for one.

Spool the tape forward 25 years to earlier this year. Back in the summer I received an e-mail from a customer (let's call him John) who'd experienced a major hard drive crash on his computer. He'd spent weeks trying to gather up information simply to work out what he'd lost, and was now in the process of trying, wherever possible, to recover it. John knew he'd bought a number of FLAC and MP3 downloads from us but couldn't remember what or when - could we possibly help him and maybe even let him download some of them again?

To me the response to this seemed clear and obvious. I typed John's e-mail address into our downloads account search box and requested every download he'd bought since we started. Within a couple of seconds I was looking at a screen showing a dozen or more purchases, and a few clicks later these were all re-enabled with download e-mails heading his way - and a two-week (renewable) window to retrieve new copies from our server. In a short space of time this small aspect of John's record collection was back on his new drive (plus back-up) and the problem was solved.

Our download system is pretty simple and basic in this respect. Larger, more integrated systems handle this automatically. When you're browsing through eMusic.com the display immediately tells you when you've come across something you've already purchased - but it will allow you to repeat the download if necessary.

Amazon's approach to their electronic books is even more integrated - when you purchase a Kindle book it registers to your account. If you start up your Kindle, or your Kindle-reader software, not only does the software download anything you have bought but not yet received automatically, but it'll even update your device on the latest page you're up to in any particular title - very useful if you switch from one reading device to another. It's all very integrated, and wherever you are all you need to do is download and install Kindle reading software onto a suitable PC, Mac, phone or whatever, set it up for your Amazon account, and it'll immediately start transferring your reading collection to that device, complete with notes, page markers and so on.

This all makes perfect sense - it plays on the advantages of 'soft' data over 'hard' product, costs virtually nothing to implement, and serves to enhance the user experience and offer clear advantages over what came before. Even if your brother's best friend sits on your Kindle and snaps it, your book collection lives on; even if your hard drive goes up in smoke, your music collection can be revived on a different drive at no cost.

Yet the one major online retailer for whom this is not the case is, I was very surprised to learn, iTunes. If your iTunes collection is "sat upon" by a six-year-old named Paul you'd better hope you've kept a copy somewhere else, because the nice folk at Apple certainly won't do anything to help you recover it unless you fancy spending your money all over again.

You might think this is a legacy of being the first major supplier of music downloads, operating to the 'old way' of thinking, but it turns out they used to have just such a recovery system, albeit a one-off, use-it-then-lose-it option, which you applied for and gave you a single opportunity to download again everything you had bought from the iTunes store. This option appears to have vanished. In this respect, at least, it seems that despite the simple opportunities to offer something that improves on the past, as far as Apple is concerned it might as well still be 1963 - especially now they've added all those Beatles songs to their roster.


Historical footnote: If you go further back in time and examine HMV record catalogues of the 1920s and early 1930s you'll discover something interesting listed in their record pricing section - the "Allowance for worn out or broken His Master's Voice records, made on condition that a new His Master's Voice record of the same diameter is purchased for every old one returned". Set at a penny for a 7-inch record, 2 pennies for a 10-inch record, and 3 pennies for a 12-inch record in 1928, this allowance had been halved by 1932 and soon vanished completely.


Andrew Rose, December 10th, 2010