Why so much "By Song Only" stuff on iTMS lately?
Over the past few weeks, checking out the "Just Added" section of iTMS, I've been seeing a lot of albums that are listed as "By Song Only". It's a bit annoying.
First of all, in the case where an album has 10 or fewer tracks, the price of buying the album a song at a time or all at once is going to be the same: $0.99 * track count. Since Apple and the record label will make the same amount of money no matter what, why not for convenience sake have a "Buy Album" button? (Or, "Add Album" if you're using a shopping cart rather than one-click.)
Then, in other cases, when there are a good bit more than 10 tracks, the cost of inconveniently buying a whole album via dozen-or-more-click shopping can go way over what buying a CD would cost. I recall seeing one album that had 24 tracks, many of them only thirty seconds to two minutes long, that would cost a ridiculous $23.76 to buy on iTunes.
I really hope this trend doesn't continue, and that Apple pushes harder to get the various labels to agree to selling whole albums as well as individual tracks, and to do so for most of these albums at the $9.99 price that until now had been much more commonplace.
First of all, in the case where an album has 10 or fewer tracks, the price of buying the album a song at a time or all at once is going to be the same: $0.99 * track count. Since Apple and the record label will make the same amount of money no matter what, why not for convenience sake have a "Buy Album" button? (Or, "Add Album" if you're using a shopping cart rather than one-click.)
Then, in other cases, when there are a good bit more than 10 tracks, the cost of inconveniently buying a whole album via dozen-or-more-click shopping can go way over what buying a CD would cost. I recall seeing one album that had 24 tracks, many of them only thirty seconds to two minutes long, that would cost a ridiculous $23.76 to buy on iTunes.
I really hope this trend doesn't continue, and that Apple pushes harder to get the various labels to agree to selling whole albums as well as individual tracks, and to do so for most of these albums at the $9.99 price that until now had been much more commonplace.