I see that Apple’s price increases are supposed to have caused Amazon to raise its own. Perhaps.

Yesterday (not realizing Apple was raising prices) I finally got around to upgrading my iTunes purchases to iTunes Plus. I had 16 items, and upgrading cost me $4.60. Apparently the upgrade price of $0.30 per item didn’t go up.

On the other hand, either I screwed up and deleted the wrong files, or I got screwed by Apple, because when I count them today, I have 17 .m4a files (without DRM) and 9 .m4p files (with DRM).

I also purchased 23 songs in MP3 format from Amazon. It looked like the average price was very close to $0.99, with only a few songs costing anything else. I tend to prefer Amazon because it has greater selection and lower prices. A purist might prefer Apple’s encoding scheme to old-school MP3s. Or maybe they wouldn’t. I haven’t investigated, because MP3 is adequate for me.

Anyway, higher prices or not, it’s nice to be able to buy $25 worth of music and get 23 songs you specifically wanted.

So. What did I buy? Well, too many to list here. But a couple of examples: Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” and America’s “Sister Golden Hair.” (The older I get, the more I like music from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.)