iTunes now offering refunds policy (Pop music in danger?)

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

if people are refunded, does the artist not get that money? or is it apple itself refunding?

 

That's what really matters at the end of the day, though charts are alright too

 

 

Still seems like a bad idea tbh

[Morphine Prince 96,178]

iTunes isn't really big in Europe so this rule affects US the most.

What is the biggest digital music store there? 

 

Actually, they are trying to push all foreign companies out or something. They want Google to not store so much personal info. too.

[MonsterOfSpain 8,275]

What is the biggest digital music store there? 

 

Actually, they are trying to push all foreign companies out or something. They want Google to not store so much personal info. too.

 

I don't know. Digital music is not big in Spain, and the rest of Europe except UK I think. Streaming is a lot bigger.

[Lona Delery 7,177]

Mess. You even have previews of the songs

You can't just buy a CD for example, open it, play it, maybe even copy the stuff on your computer and bring it back in 14 days... This does not work.

This could hit the music industry hard.

[Gagz 2,572]

Doesn't this go against federal copyright laws? Like, you can't return a CD to a store once you've opened it.

[Poker 3,312]

But you can copy the files or move them to a phone and you will have the album for free omg 

 

This is the end of music as we know it. Spotify wasnt so bad after all 

[MonsterOfSpain 8,275]

Doesn't this go against federal copyright laws? Like, you can't return a CD to a store once you've opened it.

 

They let my father do it once

[Runway 27,876]

Living For Refunds slaying i c

[VasilisVas 4,647]

But this is kinda a good thing. Now, you buy an album, test it out then return it if it's bad.

This will also encourage artists to make REALLY good albums so that people won't return it

That's what YouTube is for. I always listen to songs in YouTube before I decide to buy it or not.

[Memo 176]

But won't this make me able to download whatever I want? I mean I could just buy an album, copy the files, get a refund, buy another album, etc :smh:

[Sebastien 16]

Doesn't this mean that you could copy the file to a different folder, return the original, and use the copied version in iTunes? Free music? This is a mess, where will this feature be available? 

[RAMROD 96,481]

Doesn't this mean that you could copy the file to a different folder, return the original, and use the copied version in iTunes? Free music? This is a mess, where will this feature be available?

Europe only

[StrawberryBlond 13,287]

A massive change that's going to make things very interesting indeed. There's so many questions that need to be answered. Will refunds be discounted from an artist's total sales (or once its been purchased does it forever count as a sale)? Will the artist lose out on money through refunds or is it just iTunes that lose out? Is there a limit to how many tracks/albums you can return (to deter people who just want to listen to whole albums for free and then get refunded)? I certainly think that there should be a quota given each month that you can return and you'll be notified of how many "strikes" you've got left, as it were. That way, it would encourage people to still be mindful of what they download and not overuse the refund system just because they can. People nowadays have such low attention spans that I wouldn't be surprised if they convinced themselves that they were bored of an album after 2 weeks because the offer of a full refund is just too seductive. In that case, Rihanna had better watch out. I've heard admissions from her own fans that they got bored of her last 2 albums within a couple of months. With this refund offer in place, their attention could be diminished to mere weeks.

 

I certainly approve of such a concept as I don't think digital copies of anything should be exempt from refunds. Anything you pay for (with the exception of entertainment tickets, for obvious reasons) should hold the right to be returned if the customer is unsatisfied. And it would certainly stop all these problems of kids downloading tracks onto their parents devices which they were given to play with! That happened once to someone my dad knew. His son had been playing this game on his dad's iPad, not realising that it was fee-paying and as his dad's credit details were already in, the payments were made with the press of an ok button. He ran up a massive bill and his dad had to contact the company and explain everything and while they understood and gave him a complete refund, they warned him that this was a total one-off mercy and if it ever happened again, they wouldn't refund. So, yeah, this is good if the worst comes to the worst more than once. I don't know what iTunes policy is if you wrongly (or someone unlawfully) download tracks that you didn't want. And as someone else said, you can sometimes download the wrong version of a song and then you're stuck with it forever and have to buy twice, so refunding solves that problem.

But at the same time, this is going to cause issues for the artists themselves. So many of them could be accused of being flops when information leaks about how many copies were returned and on forums like these, everyone will be meticulously subtracting them from the overall sales of artists they dislike and laugh at them. But at the end of the day, this will force artists to release much better albums to reduce the risk of refunds. They can no longer sit back and say "even if everyone disliked it, all those copies are bought and paid for." So many people today still download a complete album after merely liking the lead single and are disappointed with the complete body of work and I don't think that's representative in an artist's sales. I've always wondered what percentage of the album's buyers genuinely loved the album.

[Slade 2,591]

This is worse than Spotify. Once you download something from iTunes, the file is saved to your computer unless you delete it. Even if you "return" it, the file is still on your computer. They can't go into your computer and remove the file. This is basically buying an album, saving the music to your computer, and getting a full refund for it.

[retroglamx 5,087]

So I can purchase an album, copy the material to a different drive and then ask for a refund so I get my money back and I keep iTunes files? How is this even logical?