My first iTune purchase?

I was very much enjoying practicing and playing with the morning service team. The music they picked, the energy of the team members and the arrangement we used totally reminded me the good old days when I was playing drum set at Bridge Community Church.

Speaking of the Sunday service, I was trying to find the CD version of song that we will do this coming Sunday morning since I believe the arranegemnt expection the team made was based on some CD recording on some praise and worship music CD. I have to admit that after trying to find audio sample with no luck on Amazon.com and some CD purchase site, and turned my way to look for the song in Google using terms like "download mp3", "torrent" and such. Still no finding.

Then I suddenly remind that I have an iTune account, which I never used it to purchase anything except downloading some free TV shows and songs when they have special promotion. So far I mostly use iTune to download Podcast to listen while I am on the road, so the idea of PURCHASING something from iTune was actually pretty new to me. Nevertheless, I enter "You", which is the songs name, in the search dialog box.

Boom.

Song Title: You
Album: Live Vineyard Worship: Winds of Worship - Come Now Is The Time
Singer: (she's also the writer too) Rita Springer
Cost: $0.99

Cool! I should have try this in the very beginning! But just before I pressed the "Buy Song" button, I suddenly remember the REASON why I never brought anything from iTune before.

DRM. Digital Right Management.

In order to listen to the songs I purchase from iTune on my Pocket PC PDA, or my Nokia 5300 music phone, or my iRiver 40Gb MP3 Player, I have to burn the song to a CDRW disc, and rip it back into MP3 again, thus lowering the quality of the music. I don't have an Apple iPod, so the only way to enjoy the music file that I brought is to play it on my PC. And I hate that.

Nevertheless I want to listen to that music a few time before tomorrow's Sunday service, and $0.99 is not bad a cost to just do that job.

Still, I have that some day these music sellers will drop this DRM thing. I mostly blame record companies because it was THEIR idea that this DRM will help them to make more money in long run. It's not. It only encourage buyers to skip legal digital music download and go for either illegal download (as they are all DRM free) or buying the physical CD (since there's no DRM on CD, as even the rootkitted Sony CDs were being replaced with regular CD).

Until then.... sign... buy song, burn and rip again.