A few nights ago, I was playing music at an outdoor party with friends and when one of the players wanted to see the scrolling music app I was using on my tablet,Guitar Chords and Tabs (an Android app, which is also available on the web at https://www.chords-and-tabs.net/). He was excited, at first, that so many songs had already been worked out just for the taking, but when I told him it cost $5 “for life,” he started arguing “Why not $10, or $10 a year? How can the guy make any money only charging $5?”
This is a person who (I think) would probably describe himself as somewhere between liberal and socialist in his politics, but he has a giant fault line in his expectations: he owns an iPhone. As an Apple product user, he has been conditioned to be ripped off every few moments when Apple “updates” some piddly aspect of their mediocre products and requires the Faithful to march down to the Apple Store or T-Mobile or where ever they take their Apple cornholing and spend ten times what the competition asks for a better, more flexible, and at least as secure product. (Cell phones are notoriously insecure computers.)
I, of course, made it worse by demonstrating all of the free-to-$10 apps I use on my $80 Samsung phone and my $70 Hi10 (10”) XPro Android tablet. His marketing- tutored mind seemed to go into overload and he started to download Ultimate Guitar, a $90/year app that runs on Android and Apple. I probably broke something else in his head when I told him that I get Ultimate Guitar for free because I submit 6-10 song “interpretations” to the app every year. Years of Apple-conditioning has taught him “there is no reasonably priced lunch” and he couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that someone working on a program in their spare time would settle for “only” making a few hundred thousand dollars on a very popular app that only costs $5 per customer.
I haven’t always despised Apple. Back in the early 80s the Apple II was sometimes the only small business computer that made sense. Even up to the moment the Mac arrived, Apple was a reasonably customer-friendly and responsive company. When Jobs squeezed Wozniak out of Apple in ‘83, the company started rolling downhill fast and by the time Jobs was back and in full control, the company tried to monetize every breath their sucker/customers took. By the ‘87 an Apple keyboard, never a particularly impressive piece of equipment, cost $150 when even a decent name-brand PC keyboard from Logitech sold for about $50. Software, hardware, and service were all sold at a premium and Apple’s customers loved the abuse. Like the Trump cult, the more ruthlessly and rudely Apple treats its victims the more they lavish fealty to the rotten-cored company.
People are weird.
I got a big taste of those expectations on one of the Facebook groups when a few young Logic users practically came unglued on another musician for using an “obsolete Mac Pro running an unsupported OS and several generations ancient version of Logic.” Their “logic” was, “1) You can’t make good music on old software and 2) not running state-of-the-art software and hardware is ‘cheating the Apple developers.’”
When I taught music production classes I’d constantly remind my students that people made great records on every “crappy” old version of DAW software in existence. Supposedly, The Beach Boys (sans Brian Wilson) " Summer in Paradise” was one of the first albums recorded on Sound Tools, which later grew up and became Pro Tools. That’s not saying much for Sound Tools, since that was a really awful Beach Boy’s album (covering songs from Sly Stone to The Drifters). It has been a long time since a crappy sounding record was in any way the fault of the technology. And that #2 argument is disgusting. Software developers are the last people who would be rewarded (if ever) in a braindead, greedy, top-heavy corporation like Apple. If you bought the software, it’s yours not theirs. You owe them nothing, unless you stole it. Even then, you could probably make a convincing argument that once it’s on your computer, it’s yours. 😉
