New single (BIY) and pre-order of "What's That Sound" album on Friday, June 16th.

[Tusk]

(I've got an aversion to itunes... Amazon treats it like you own the music.. not only rent it)

I'm not sure if I'm understanding the issue, once it's downloaded to your computer from Itunes onto your computer, it is a file that sits in your computer, there's no 'renting'....I just looked at mine, it's not an MP3, it's an M4A file, but I can right click it and play it on a non iTunes player, like a Windows Media Player or VLC....

Maybe you don't know where to find the download on your PC? You have to find your music folder, where your players go to find the music you play on your PC...here's how I navigate to the audio files I bought from iTunes (on my PC not a mac or Apple)

Open Folder, chose "this PC", then click the drive your data is on, usually it's C Drive.
Then in "C" Drive, chose "Users" chose the name you open your desktop with, mine is the "Tony" file. Then Click "Music". Click the "iTunes" folder, then "iTunes Media" Then click "Music".

In the "Music" file, you will see folders w/ Artists names of the songs you bought, so in this case, chose the "Haley Reinhart" folder. Open that and there will be folders w/ the album names of the songs you bought, in this case, you want to click open the one called "What's That Sound" The audio (m4A) file should be in that folder as well as the album image....

So this is the summary of the path to the iTunes audio file:

C:\Users\Tony\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\Haley Reinhart\What's That Sound_

Then you can right click the audio file and chose what ever media player you want...it's not necessary at all to involve Apple after your purchase. As far as I know, you can load it onto a flash drive, do anything you want with it, load it onto your phone?

A caveat is, Apple does keep your purchases in the iCloud, so if you log onto iTunes on another computer, you might be able to play the songs on with internet, but you would have to download it again if you want it on the new PC you're using. Warning, Apple allows 5 players to have this access, so don't download it from their storage willy nilly....it is a file, and you can move it whenever you want....

I buy from ITunes and have always played it on my PC, only just bought an iPhone, so you see? no Apple player needed.