New iTS Feature: Complete My Album
By popular demand, Apple has introduced a new and extremely useful feature called Complete My Album into iTS. Frequent iTunes Store buyers will have no doubt found themselves in the predicament when they’ve bought a single for a yet to be released album. A few weeks or months later, that album comes out and you find that you like it and want to purchase it.. only to have wasted that dollar on the single that you’ll be receiving again in the complete album.
Looking through the 725 items in my purchased playlist (many were from that free song deal through facebook), I have 7 duplicate songs from this exact issue. That’s $6.93 not in my pocket. I am thoroughly pleased with this new feature and am sure it will come in handy in the future. Others, however, think this is a ploy by the record corporations to get people to buy music they don’t really care for.
I’m going to guess that the record companies are behind this “feature” and not Apple, as the latter have always promoted single-track purchases, and the former have not.
There is a slight catch though. You can only use Complete My Album within 180 days of the single purchase. If you want to give Complete My Album a try, head over to the iTunes Store and click on the banner. On the Complete My Album page, the albums you can complete are listed for you. How much money would you have saved if this feature was implemented in the iTunes Store much earlier?
It’s About time! That was one thing that really got to me about the iTunes Music Store.
This new feature isn’t going to get me to ‘upgrade’ and buy any full albums just for the craic, so sorry to the record companies! It will however stop me cursing iTunes when I decide the purchase of a full album is in order, only to effectively loose money on the single or singles I have already purchased from that album.
Now if only they could make it so you can download your purchases more than once. Like when iTunes crashes (on windows, predictably) halfway through downloading an album, only to sware blind you only bought half the album when it restarts, forcing you to re purchase what it lost :(
Great feature! It’s about time.
I hardly ever buy albums, and this won’t change that for me. My problem arrises from having incomplete albums from non-iTunes related purchases, including CD’s. iTunes will still gladly sell me a duplicate song in this case. Yet they can figure out the album art. Hmmmm.
This is now available on my side of the Atlantic too, w00t.