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Comment by shin_lao | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem was charging $ 40 to get to iTunes. Either you give the full catalog or you don't but it shouldn't be something you can purchase.

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The $40 was a service fee to cover the cost of having someone at CDBaby go into the warehouse, pick up a copy of the CD, put it into the CD drive, type in all the album, artist and track info and hitting "scan" and then putting it back when things are done. Doesn't sound like that big of a deal, you could do it for "free" yourself at home. But if CDBaby had to do 5000 of them there's a real cost associated. For a lot of people it's worth $40 to not have to think about anything and for it to "just work".

As I read the article, I couldn't figure out why Derek and cdbaby didn't just script a solution to submit the data appropriately from his already amassed archive (which he could then sell as another service on the side).

Straight from the article:

>Then they showed the Apple software we'd all have to use to send them each album. It required us to put the audio CD into a Mac CD-Rom drive, type in all of the album info, song titles and bio, then click [encode] for it to rip, and [upload] when done.

>I raised my hand and asked if it was required that we use their software. They said yes.

>I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.

>Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that's what Apple needs, OK.

I do wonder if they couldn't have reverse-engineered a solution by sniffing the network traffic. I hope they at least tried.

Or perhaps disk images + AppleScript? I dunno if iTunes in those days supported ripping from an image.

Part of it was probably local encryption using iTunes' AAC DRM stuff, which would be hard to replicate.

Right.. but there are always ways around scripting repetitive tasks.. even if we're talking about creating a virtual drive, building a virtual image, querying and populating metadata from your db, and still using their transport mechanism/software.. it should still be possible.

I don't think was that easy to do all this virtualization stuff back in 2003. And even if it was, why would he invest resources to do this when the artists were willing to pay him?

From reading the text, was he able to charge $40 again? Seems unclear.

I can see Apple not wanting to introduce a middle man.

He does say in the comments that after the refund- most of the artists told him to keep the $40.

I usually skip the comments and just come here. :-)

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