Yesterday I was superenthusiastic about Hecq, and decided to see what else I could pick up from their catalogue. I saw that “Scatterheart” is not available on emusic.com, and is only an expensive import at Amazon, and decided – what the hell – to buy a copy of iTunes. At $9.99 it seemed like a bargain, but when it had been paid for and downloaded I found to my dismay that the bitrate is 128kbps. Why?

Why is the download 128kbps? A very few people might pay for a 128kbps download, and then buy the CD if they really liked it, but to all intents and purposes, if someone pays good money for a download then that is the deal and no more buying will be done. From the point of view of the publisher, some people might be pushed up to a higher priced CD version. But in this case the CD is not available in the US, and anyway, does the publisher really make more money that way? There is certainly nothing in it for iTunes, they don’t sell CDs.

I almost feel like I am being punished for buying music on downloads rather than on CD. “OK, here you are then, here’s your music, but – hehehehe – I’ll just knock the quality down a tiny bit because where else are you going to go – hehehehe.”

I consider my relationship with the music part of iTunes terminated until they clean up their act quality-wise. (Of course there is still the App store – hehehehe.)