...locks you in deeper. Want to buy a different portable music player next time you buy one? I hope you don't mind throwing away 5 years of songs you bought on iTunes, because they aren't going to work with anything else.

[ Not precicely. I burn all my iTunes tracks to CD and re-rip them in unprotected format. This is 100% within the terms and gives me a nice backup copy of the album too. You can say, that this is too much of a PITA for you to want to bother with, but it's the surefire legal way to not get locked in. I do worry a bit about the encoding losses, but i figure we're still a fuckton better off than we were with, say, tapes, or records, in terms of maintenance issues, and i gain a little convenience. That being said, i still don't buy much from iTunes. Only things that spark a sudden interest and need to be bought immediately for the most part. Anyway. iTunes isn't the right answer, but it's the right answer for right now, sometimes. -k]

Every Song you buy on iTunes...