From Steve Job’s Time Magazine interview:
TIME: Do you think you’ll be able to sway the tens of millions who use the unauthorized services?
Jobs: I don’t know. We’ll find out. But this is really a far better experience. Not only do the downloads not crap out half way through; and not only is it perfectly encoded instead of having the last four seconds cut off …
Although I’m very skeptical about the service overall, I like where its going. All those lemurs who encoded their music so poorly. Stupid Xing, Stupid Real Jukebox. Why I remember the days when Sound Edit 16 was the best encoder…ah…
Really though. I’ve been going through my iTunes library updating tags (still) and I’ve just been deleting shoddily encoded and cut up songs. You get what you pay for.
I forgot to mention how good the interview is. Steve is very honset: “Downloading sucks on their service!”