Feel free to enlighten me then. They must have come to a conclusion similar to what I stated otherwise they wouldn't have gone through with the deal. The record companies aren't daft enough to have not worked out that users would attempt to use illegitimate copies to gain ones from Apple.
Zalgiris beat me to it...
Agreed.
If someone obtains an illegitimate copy of a track, the record labels aren't seeing anything from it financially. Sure,
maybe that person goes on and actually buys/legitimately downloads the rest of the cd, but I'd be willing to bet that doesn't happen as much as people suggest.
The record labels are coming out even better from this because they are finally collecting, albeit a small portion, from the illegitimate users
plus their collecting again from the people who actually paid for the songs in the first place.
Besides, it's not like the person who pirated the song really gets more music now. They still have the same illegal copy, and that copy was in their iTunes folder, and thus on their iDevices anyways.
Sure, maybe they now have a better version of the song, but what was to stop them from pirating a better copy? Obviously their morals aren't, because they've already pirated the song in the first place.
