1. A penny per listen. Why should people pay almost a full dollar for music they’re only going to listen to 12 times? How sweet would be if iTunes just tracked our listening habits and charged accordingly?
2. Also, once you listen to music 99 times, it stops charging you and gives you 4 free listens on any one song of your choice.
3. Then you are automatically sent a $1 e-tificate ($1 will be automatically deducted from your account). You can embed the e-tificate as much as you want on your myspace, blog, facebook, last.fm page or blog.
4. To keep people from stopping the song right before it gets to the end and opting out of paying their penny, once a song gets 10 seconds in, that will count as one half of a listen. Half listens can be combined from different songs to charge users for whole listens. That way people are encouraged not to start listening songs they’re not going to finish.
5. It should be noted that all these rules apply to both music purchased from iTunes Store and imported from other sources. This will be incentive for listeners to take advantage of the convenience and user friendliness of the iTunes store.
6. When you rate a song four stars or higher, iTunes will automatically charge you an extra half listen each time you listen to that song because you are obviously enjoying that song more.
7. This is also a bit of a convenience fee for making this song come up more on your shuffle.
8. Since this system requires that iTunes knows who’s listening to what music, users will be required to type in their Apple ID and password in between each song.
9. iTunes will require you to change your password once a week and change your username & password once a month to keep people from sharing accounts.
10. If you don’t change your password you will be locked out of your music.
11. If you go out of town and don’t have access to your iTunes library, you should either have someone change your password while you're away or let iTunes know how long you’ll be out of town.
12. I know what you’re thinking: what if there’s a group of people listening to music, like at a get-together? That’s what the Apple iGroup Code would be for. Listeners simply start up a new iGroup, enter their Apple IDs and passwords, come up with an iGroup password and then enter that password in between songs. There should also be a cool sidebar or something to check and uncheck people as they enter and exit the room or rooms in which the music is streaming so that they are not unfairly charged. Everyone hearing a song will be charged a full penny.
13. A lot of people send each other music through Instant Messenger programs and websites like yousendit.com. The new iTunes can really take advantage of that by:
14. Charging 8 pennies to send a friend a song.
15. Once they listen to the song 8 times, 8 listens are withdrawn from your friend’s account and placed into yours, plus you get one free extra listen to spend on the listening to of any of your own songs for your trouble.
16. If they fail to listen to a song 8 times, no big deal, you will just receive an error message every time you try to listen to that song until your friend listens to the song 8 times. This is to promote spreading music around. It’s good for bands.
By: Danny Jelinek & Matt Duffy
