So buy the version without the ads. Where is the issue? Advertising is pervasive and ubiquitous and this change doesn't affect your user experience one iota. If you don't buy the content, you won't be exposed to the ads. It's that simple.
I think you're missing the point here-- Apple will have changed their business model to where
they are looking at ads as a revenue source. Someone at Apple will be responsible for maximizing this revenue. Of course they will enter the business gingerly, but it will inevitably grow because a business, by nature, tries to grow all profit channels.
Advertising is only valuable to a certain extent, and it is therefore largely self-correcting. If the ad space exceeds the number of advertisers, it becomes devalued and diminishes. Companies seeking to advertise are going to present their ads to you somehow. Wouldn't you rather have a choice?
Advertising has not been self correcting in my experience-- in general once the first ad appears it's merely a harbinger for more. It's a runaway train. If you think one of the hottest properties on the web is going to want for advertisers, you don't understand how this works. Right now Apple is in control of the user experience and their motivations are to make it as pleasant as possible for me so they sell more music/video because that's their only revenue source. Once they start in with advertising their motivations change and subsequently my user experience is destined to change.
And companies are notorious for not facing reality on stuff like this... iTMS sales drop? It's almost certainly not going to be seen as the advertising that's doing it, it will probably be blamed on P2Ps or some such. Why? Because the guy who's job depends on maximizing ad revenue will present all kinds of statistics in the meeting making that point.
Of course advertisers are going to look for a way to get in my face, but Apple is currently a check on that. The network ads at the beginning and end of the Daily Show disappeared not long after they started and I'm that was Apple's doing-- Apple didn't see any money from the ads and they were affecting their customers experience. Their customers were under the impression they were paying for the show to get it ad free and Apple enforced that.
You're not buying Apple products, though, and the iTunes business model is nothing BUT a glorified advertising channel. They run it to sell iPods and to make money by being a dominant market force. iTunes content isn't Apple's, and respective owners could easily choose to inject ads into the files themselves. Providing a mechanism where the ads aren't mid-stream commercials gives the user the choice of paying or sitting through an ad, instead of making that determination for everyone.
iTMS is a glorified
retail channel. That's very different. And, as you point out, it's meant to sell more of Apple's products. When the market saturates with iPods, I expect that to change and iTMS will become a profit center of its own.
As an example of the difference, look at Shell. They sell gasoline. Now some of their stations are also selling time on big flat panel displays above the pumps to harass me while I'm stuck waiting to fill up. I don't use those stations... In some cases those stations used to offer me a better experience because of location, cleanliness, and what-not. Now I've lost that.
Content providers can't do whatever they want with their files. Apple controls the channel. Apple sees no revenue from the ads so they have no motivation to allow them-- especially if it's hurting their primary goal of selling iPods. Regardless, the fact that the content isn't theirs just compounds the problem-- we'll have to deal with ads from the content provider
and Apple.
I know "user choice" is supposed to be what drives the industry, but one of the things that's made Apple successful is making the right decisions about where to limit user choice. Maybe adding the option for ad supported content will make more people happy-- I'm just expressing my opinion that I won't be one of those people.
