A few weeks ago something bad happened in the cosmos and blackplastic's external hard drive with all of blackplastic's music on got corrupted. Eight thousand songs lost.
Eight thousand.
More than a month's worth of music vanished.
Now what really riled blackplastic was not the loss. It is the arrogance of a certain online music retailer who doesn't let you re-download music you have legally purchased from them. blackplastic cannot see the sense in this at all... What harm could it cause? Apple suggest backing up music purchased from them on a regular basis. So in other words, when I pay my extortionate 79 pence for a song, as soon as I have downloaded it, if I want to be sure I don't lose it I should burn it to a CD, costing me additional money, where it will sit in a case with no artwork in case something goes wrong.
Frankly most online music stores are a blatant rip off. blackplastic will continue to use the iTunes music store to listen to clips of music that it is thinking about buying in hard copy but until it gets a lot cheaper, it won't be spending much money there.
Fancy a refreshing change? Head on over to http://www.emusic.com. blackplastic doesn't know whether it will let you re-download previous purchases since the external hard drive is still not sorted and as such blackplastic isn't buying any music. What blackplastic does know is that the music is in mp3 format (no wma files here please!) and features no drm encoding and, best of all, is cheap as chips and the site has a free trial... Can't say fairer than that can you?