So, someone at Microsoft apparently had one of these moments and now I’m beginning to see those Zune Pass ads about it costing $30,000 to fill up your iPod everywhere. They have employed a very clever technique to persuade you that you’re wasting money on music when you could just pay $15 a month for music you will never own. It’s called math.
But I have a problem. See, they’re claiming that if you filled up your iPod with music from iTunes it would cost you thirty grand. Which makes sense. Wait, sorry, make that “not at all”—it makes no sense.
The thinking is this: You’ve got a 120 GB iPod. That’s 120,000 megabytes. Now, if by some divine knowledge we say that an average song is 4 minutes long, and if the same divine knowledge says that each minute of music takes about 1 megabyte of space to store it, that’s 4 megabytes (MB from here on out) per song. Dividing 120,000 MB by 4 MB leaves us with 30,000 songs. The iTunes Store is known far and wide for pioneering the $1 a song business model, so therefore, 30,000 songs = 30,000 bucks. And now Microsoft has a whole website dedicated to this fact.
The problem I have with this stems from a very simple fact: the 1 MB per minute principle? Not so much anymore. If you remember correctly, the iTunes Store switched to DRM-free 256 kbps AAC-encoded music a short time ago. From the iPod classic features page, in the fine print, we read:
Music capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding.
Emphasis in there is mine.
Now that the bitrate of all songs on the iTunes Store has doubled, it’s not hard to say that the size of the “average” song on iTunes has doubled as well. Instead of the average song being 4 MB, it’s now closer to 8 MB. (Maybe a little less since they may be using variable bit rate encoding, but hey, we’re talking Microsoft Math here.)
Therefore, the new, real math would be something more like $15,000 to fill up your iPod at $1 a song. For those not real good with math, that’s half of 30,000, and also, half what Microsoft uses a whole advertising campaign to claim.
All this based on the premise, of course, that:
- you actually pay for all your music on a song-by-song basis,
- you have nothing else on your iPod besides $1 songs from iTunes, and
- you actually manage to fill up a 120 GB iPod classic… completely with songs from the iTunes Store… bought on a song-by-song basis.
…
Not to mention that you will actually own these songs forever, of course.
