For the longest time I never used iTunes, yet after the last major upgrade to iTunes (version 9) I began to use it much more, and even started to really enjoy using it. Perhaps owning a Macbook and an iPhone (and all that time I spent getting apps from the app store) has helped.
Something else that has helped was an important change within iTunes to DRM associated with music. Previously you purchased music through iTunes and you played it on your iPod and iTunes, and nowhere else. As someone who's never been an iPod user that really never worked for me. Nowadays you can buy DRM Free music on iTunes and send it to whatever MP3 player you like, so now I can enjoy my music in iTunes but also send it over to my Zune as well. That small change makes deciding to purchase music on iTunes that much easier.
Although music has gone DRM free TV shows and movies still have not (along with Audiobooks). Adding to the fact that TV and Movies are not DRM free is another strong caveat, once you download a TV show or movie you can't download it again without REBUYING it. That is a pretty strong DRM agreement. Let's say you download a TV show and you accidentally delete it before watching it, in that case you will have to rebuy it! Since everything is tied to your account they should let you redownload it through a purchase history or something like Zune and Xbox allow (although thats not always a safe bet either) but in iTunes that is not the case.
So I thought about this long and hard, especially since I most recently decided to make a pretty extensive purchase through iTunes. On one hand I understand and appreciate the rules, on the other had I loathe them. At least you know, if you screw up, its your fault and this makes backing up your purchases THAT much more important. Homesharing (introduced in iTunes 9) makes that a little easier if you have two seperate computers running iTunes. In that situation you simply just make sure you duplicate your purchases; if you don't then at least back them up to an external hard drive.
So what if you don't back up? Well you should and if you're not your running at risk all the time. Simply put if you lose it, you lose it, don't bother calling. At first I didn't think that was right, but after I thought about it longer I realized that if you buy a DVD at Best Buy and throw it in the garbage Best Buy is not going to give you a new one, you need to BUY a new one. With iTunes its the same way. Understandably this is the digital age and we should at least have some protection against a failed hard drive or an accidental delete but with iTunes thats not the case. Now it could very well be that restrictions placed upon this content from the studios is what is forcing Apple's hand and after all we know that the studio's still don't get the whole DRM thing so that's probably not far from the truth.
The funniest part to all this DRM is that in the middle of this all is the app store, a place where if you do happen to delete a program you can redownload it again for FREE! Its nice to see that music has gone DRM free and we can redownload apps, if we could get video to adopt one of those things would be that much better.
In closing if you use iTunes you're probably happy with it and as long as you do your backups your purchases should be safe. Lets face it iTunes users and dedicated users and after all have you browsed the iTunes store recently, its SO much fun!
