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Ever use steam? That's digital distribution done right.
I really don't buy the bandwidth argument either, given that I can get a 10GB game for $5 in a steam sale that can be downloaded as many times as I want -- the developers and valve make absolute bucket loads from those bargain basement sales.
Any cost associated with the occasional repeat download would more than likely be made up for by the increased number of users willing to use the service. If their download policy wasn't so frustratingly backwards, I'd use HD Tracks extensively. As it stands now, I won't touch them.
Steam is nice for a variety of reasons, yes. However, their model is very different to HDTracks since they're mass-market distribution. Only core audiophiles have any interest whatsoever in HDTracks. Also Valve has big market power with Steam and can demand fair contracts from content providers. HDTracks is no doubt getting gauged from here to tomorrow from the music publishers who are DRM-paranoid, especially about their 24-bit masters & semi-masters transferred over HDTracks no doubt more modest supply. Valve is no doubt getting huge per-GB discounts on bandwidth due to buying bandwidth in huge bulk contracts since they're wide mass-market and large-size per item transfers. They're spending far more to buy that supply, but can because they have far more customers. And publishers are willing to take a hit on it and sell at better bargains since it's DRM'ed, locked, and they don't have to splurge on copyright material. So for a $50 game, Valve maybe paid $5-10 per license. I bet HDTracks is getting toasted by publishers since they're DRM....maybe $7-8 on a $12 16/44.1. No inside information on either of them, but general knowledge of the scales of economies of the limited market and the way game publishers versus DRM-less music publishers react.
I don't like HDTracks policy, and I only somewhat like their pricing, but I don't think they're making huge boatloads of money on the deal either after costs. Profit, sure, but a steady trickle, not the huge dumptruck full of money it looks like. The music publishers on the other hand.....back the truck in slowly. Cheskey and the like aside of course....they charge a lot, pull in a lot, but of course spend fortunes on the recording as well, right down to modeling dummy heads like we see here
If you want to try to handle costs and scales of economy, just try running your own content distribution service and see how bandwidth costs start racking up
It's a lot more affordable if you're buying enough bandwidth on enough continents for a few terabytes a second.
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Just a heads up you can redownload anything you buy on iTunes now. They added a 'Purchased' section recently that allows you to redownload songs, movies, etc.
Unfortunately all of my stuff was downloaded back when they did 128kbs instead of 256...and even though they no longer sell it in 128 that's all I can DL it in.
Very cool, I'm glad to see that. I'm not, in any way an iTunes fan with 256k lossy, though I have some around, but for that content I'd still prefer it to Amazon's simply because the AAC codec is nicer than Lame which Amazon uses. On the other hand, speaking of scales of economy, it took Apple quite a long time to allow you to re-download something you bought. If it took that long for one of the top companies on the planet in terms of finances, it's hard to be too angry at little old HDTracks.
