iTunes Gift Cards
For the Kriz family gift exchange we do one of those everyone gets a $50ish dollar limit gift and tosses it under the tree, then we all draw numbers out of the hat, and grab a gift or steal an already open gift from someone else and force the victim to go pick another. This year I lucked out and scored the highest number, meaning I had my pick of any gift in the room. There were some pretty sweet presents, but in the end I pulled the trick I’ve seen my astute cousin Bryson pull and stole the very gift I brought to the party.
Normally, I’m pretty good at getting the whole shopping thing out of the way a week or so before the big event. However, I just wasn’t feeling the holiday spirit this year and I left getting something for the exchange until the xmas eve. I figured I’d stop off at the mall and grab something on the way down. But, since I wasn’t sure I felt like thinking as I bumped my way around Sherwood park mall, I ended up grabbing a couple of those stupid gift cards from the till at 7-eleven as I filled up with gas for the trip to Rimbey.
Gift cards are only technicallywhat I’d consider a gift. They are given and received like gifts, but as far as the thought that went into them goes, the attatched tag and the wrapper have a little more heart. “I could have given you $40 cash, but instead, I gave the money to a corporation and, if all goes well, you can go to that corporation and pay them even more money (unless by some fantastic luck your total comes to exactly $40.) and you’ll get an item of choice from, waffle-rama or Discount Dave’s wholesale fondu!” OR, better still, you’ll toss the card out along with all the other Xmas detritus that litters the room after a healthy round of gift wrapping rending and the corporation can keep the generous donation of 40 clams with an outlay on their part of only the pennies it took to print up the card in the first place. huzzah!
$24.8 billion worth of cards sold this Holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. If you have a gift card for a retail outlet that you’ll probably never visit, I recommend hitting google and searching for “Gift Card Swap” and you’ll quickly find a few places where you can trade your card with someone for a more appropriate card or you can sell your card (for less than face value) to some lucky penny pincher.
Anyway, iTunes.
I hate hate hate the idea of DRMed music. So, the reason I selected the card from the stack of other very tempting gifts wasn’t to get something for me, but instead, because I knew Steph was planning to grab a couple songs off of itunes for her brother anyway, I figured we could save a couple bucks and I could round off the rest of the debit with some frivolous ipod games (I bought Pac-man awhile back and it was actually quite playable). So, Skip ahead to Steph’s brother’s house. Steph has loaded all the songs for Stan into an iTunes playlist and clicked the “buy” button. This, is the standard procedure for anyone who has ever shopped online. At this juncture you will be greeted with an “enter payment details” prompt and be asked “do you have a coupon code?”. So you’d think it would be the same for iTunes? Nope. Apple licensed “one click buy” from Amazon, so the second she hit that “buy” button, it charged her credit card and started downloading the tunes. (The fact that Amazon was able to patent such a universally obvious concept in the first place is another rant entirely.)
“Oh, well, you had one-click buy checked in your preferences, clearly, it’s your own fault. Duh, Steph. I have that turned off. Here, i’ll show you, give me that card, I’ll go buy tetris.” So I click buy… aaaand BAM, it starts downloading. WHAT THE?! Goddammit so apparently I just paid them $5 from my credit card for that because it seems to have conveniently forgotten that I disabled one-click. Great. So, in trying to use my giftcard we’ve spent something like $25 altogether.
If I was my father, at this point, I’d have become enraged, called up Apple, demanded my money back as well a written apology and possibly a backrub. And believe you me, they’d have complied thanks to his uncanny ability to portray just how disgusted he is while sounding perfectly reasonable and sane. But, I’m not dad, so I’m out $25 and I’m venting in my blog. instead, I’m thinking, man, if they refund me, that’s a lot of hassle because it means we’ll have to jump through some hoops to get Steph’s brother’s songs working after they get it all sorted out on their end (thanks to nobody’s friend DRM.) I’ll just figure out how to use the stupid gift card, get myself some audiobooks that I’ve been eyeing on audible. (would have got more games, but iPod Tetris was so incredibly unplayable with my overly sensitive clickwheel that it’s soured me on the whole idea.) and never buy anything from iTunes again (or at least until they can prove they’ve stopped sucking. read: nixed the fairplay DRM).
It occurs to me that some of you may not be familiar with DRM. DRM=Digitl Rights Management. but it might be a more apt initialism of Digital Restrictions Management. Basically, all it does is sets some sort of artificial limit on what you can do with that file you just paid for. Ie. “you can only play it on your ipod, and your computer, and you can/can’t burn it to disc, and your song will self-destruct after you get your secret message from MI6.” Apple’s version of DRM is fairly liberal as far as DRM goes. And to remove the restrictions, you just burn the song to a disc and re-rip it (at a slight cost of audio-fidelity, but if you’re buying 128kbps music from itunes… chances are you’re not the sort of audiophile who would notice anyway.) And all these digital music services rely on DRM so that the RIAA will even give them permission to sell the songs in the first place. (I say all, but that’s not true, e-music offers un-DRMed (read:MP3)music from a bunch of indy bands and even some major label artists for some stuff. Johnny Cash? Flogging Molly? RAWK! Actually, it’s worth giving them a shot. I think about signing up from time to time and then realize I don’t even listen to all 60gigs of music i’ve legitimately stolen from my dad’s music collection, so I don’t really have a burning need to be amassing more. But here’s a link just the same, emusic.)
I’d take comfort in the fact that apple’s not really making any money off of this whole debacle, because from the 99 cent per song pie, the RIAA makes something like 70cents, the credit card company takes something like 25cents, leaving apple with approximately a nickle to pay their, i’m sure, quite- large bandwidth bills. But I’m not sure what even an approximate breakdown is for games and audiobooks. And I’m not sure that cash going to mastercard and the RIAA is any better than it going to the company that’s designed one poor interface in a ratio against the countless other perfectly awesome stuff they produce.
Well, if you get an iTunes card, click over on the right of the cluttered storefront on the little “Redeem” link and it adds a cute little black on yellowy-green calculator LCD balance graphic to the top right of the itunes nav bar showing how much cash you’ve already given them.
-dean
