Apple is the single largest music seller on the planet. They’re in charge of this experiment. I have no worries about my collection, or about my legitimate source.

Your post and subsequent questions indicate you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

Have a nice day.

“Apples claim that they are not making money off iTunes is not true. They WERE not making money off iTunes in the past, They do so now… The main issue they had in the past was credit card transaction fees. If you have noticed, They batch it now”

Actually, they have always batched sales, that’s nothing new. You also don’t understand that the more music they sell, the more bandwidth they require, which means costs go up, not down. Also, the more songs/content they provide, the more server storage space they need. These costs also add up, a lot in fact.

Apple did not claim that they are not making money, they said they are currently making money and in fact are in business to make money, however if they had to eat this cost increase, then they would be running the store at a loss.

The labels should eat the cost increase, after all, it’s their artists requesting the raise. I’m not even sure why Apple is involved in this discussion, they’re just a distributor of the music. Bottom line here is Apple doesn’t want to have to push this increase on their customers.

The profits may not be huge. But that does not mean it is a loss making business.

“Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.”