Controversy Of Itunes

The Web 2.0 has revolutionized business practice and the cross-platform iTunes functionality is one of the representatives by selling music with DRM-free. Apple has removed the Fairplay Digital Rights Management system from iTunes music in order to create a larger iTunes user base and protect its integrated platform. This action also enables Apple to protect the corporate knowledge on user interfaces and industrial design. Nevertheless, this refusal was meet some criticisms which claimed that the reason why Apple is afraid of illegal copies of music is because it need to take advantages as a leader in the market position of both music players (iPod) and electronic music sales (iTunes). However, from consumers’ perspective, many users agree since Apple has removed DRM, the experience of browsing the iTunes Store comes to be much more

The record label can obtain the remaining 65 percent income and only then musicians will be paid between 8 to 11 cents for each song (The Vly House, 2011). Despite of the incredible amount of sold songs a day, the profit remains less neither for both content providers nor Apple. An artist must sell 12,399 tracks or 1,299 albums on iTunes per month to reach the level of US minimum wage. Likewise, iTunes Music services are only a fraction regarding to all Apple’s services. Most of iTunes’ users are likely to purchase single songs at a time, which highly reduces the overall profit margin, even if the intelligent system that can delay single transactions and converges them into grouping transactions is not able to bring Apple more profits. As for the record labels, they are not really earning great deal of money either, The economist once reported that “paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs” (The Economist,