I've been tempted. Tempted by the allure of half-priced albums. Maybe it's the DMCA-hater in me, but I completely have to side with Real in their latest tiff with Apple. Apple (and their army of zombie monkeys) claims that Real crossed the line when they reverse engineered Apple's DRM to allow songs purchased from Real's online store to be played on the iPod. If you ask me, this is completely ridiculous; competition is only fair. I've been a fairly avid Apple supporter ever since iTunes came to window, but Real is right on this one. You shouldn't only have one choice when it comes to purchasing music online to use on your iPod.
Normally, I'm not all that keen on anything from Real. They left quite the bad taste in my mouth several years ago with their ad-ridden software. But I really believe that they're cleaning up their act. There are still quite a few ads scattered throughout the software, but it's really not nearly as bad as it used to be. But as I said, it's the price cut that's gotten me to download two albums so far. When the prices return to normal, I can't exactly say which store I'll choose to shop at more, but it never hurts to have options.
Of course, the whole format thing doesn't concern me much at all either. So long as I can burn it to CD, I don't care. If it's in a format that I hate, I'll just burn it to CD, rip it to a format I like (like MP3 or Ogg), and be just as happy. I'm just insanely skeptical of any DRM. The first thing I do with any music I buy online is to burn it to CD. That way, if someone happens to want to, say, change the terms of my license, I can always rip the CD to a non-encumbered file format. Yes, I know, the quality might be slightly less, but I never was that much of an audiophile to care anyway.
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