Apple Makes It Easier To Do The Right Thing

I’ve said before that I try not to download content by means other than those in which it’s made legally available to me, so I’m glad iTunes is making it easy and cost-effective to retroactively pay at least some of the cost of music people downloaded illegally in the past. The music industry’s never going to recover all the money it lost to downloading in the period before pricing and technology caught up with consumer demand (and I imagine the fights over fair value for downloaded music would be pitched). This seems reasonable: the industry and artists recover some money and gets a revenue stream that presumably will last in perpetuity as long as consumers keep ponying up their $25 a year. The price threshold is low enough that a lot of people will probably do it, even if not everyone does. And we all get another experiment in getting people to pay for content as we continue to figure out what works and what doesn’t.