While thinking about digital music recently, and how great it was the BMI decided to sell some of its music on iTunes without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). However, these tracks will cost $2 while the DRM’d tracks will cost $1. First of all, this seems to be a scheme to prove that the public doesn’t really want non-DRM’d music when Jon Random User probably doesn’t even know the difference and won’t see why he should pay twice as much for the same song.

Second, I have realized that the whole scheme – even paying $1/song – is ridiculous. Why would I buy a digital album for $10 if I could buy the same album as a CD for $10. And the CD has no DRM, has cover art, and serves as a backup in case my hard drive gets wiped out. Not only that, but it’s a perfect digital reproduction. The AACs being sold on iTunes are 128kbps. That’s in the middle of the scale – certainly not best quality. For $1/song I should be able to by FLACs, not AACs! For the uninformed, FLAC is a file format which is perfect quality and does not involve any loss of quality while still achieving awesome compression rates.

Finally, it doesn’t cost them anything to have infinite copies of a digital song, but it costs money to make CDs and ship them to best buy. If anything, music bought online should be CHEAPER than CDs. Until then, I will only buy CDs!