Recently I had some time to listen to some good music. Particularly I enjoyed the tunes of The Black Keys.
Spotify streams their gorgeous album „Brothers“ in two different flavors (standard & deluxe edition), but provides only two songs of their newest album „Turn Blue“. The bestselling album „El Camino“ is not listed on Spotify at all.
So I headed over to the Apple iTunes Store, where they obviously had their complete discography available. I decided to purchase:
Unfortunately, all I got from iTunes was this error message telling me that I can not purchase both albums at this time:
Now I wanted them even more!
Google Play Store to the rescue!
Also I had an account on Google Play for ages and even had the Google Music Manager installed to upload my iTunes Library, I did not use the service very often.
It was a little bit of a surprise that they had both items I was looking for and an even better price(!):
So I ended up adding my PayPal account to Google Wallet (their payment service) and finally had the chance to listen to those tunes. I saved 3,50€ there. Complete success!
Funfact: nonsense prices
The Deluxe Edition of the „Brothers“ album includes six live songs on a second disk.
So one would guess: more songs = more value = bigger price. Let's see:
Apple iTunes Store
Obviously Apple knows how to make some good money.
Google Play Store
Now, where the hell does this difference come from? I do not know.
Add to Library…
For historical reasons I collect my songs in iTunes since I digitalized all my CDs. I was happily subsribing to iTunes Match, when Apple first announcing this service and upgraded my library of ~10.000 songs.
So I downloaded my newest goods from Google Play Store and added those tracks (320 kbps MP3 DRM-free) to my iTunes Library. Soon iTunes Match kicked in and matched those songs with the music catalog from Apple.
The result? A perfect match.
What does that mean? I can download the iTunes Store version of both albums (256 kbps AAC DRM-free), which I could not purchase earlier and even saved 3,50€ which is 14% of the fee for iTunes Match (24,99€ per year).
Conclusion
I am not sure, who did not receive those 3,50€ now, but I am pretty sure that it will not be the artist at the end.
Maybe I should cancel my iTunes Match subscription and move my libary to Google Music completely. Or maybe I start with doing this rule of three more often and see how it works out. Anyway, I think saving the money and go to more concerts, will make more people happy at the end…