100 Million Songs
Ok, I'm an entertainment junkie. I admit it. My movie fixation has gotten worse with Netflix. My TV obsession has gotten worse with Tivo. My music adoration has gotten worse with itunes. (All have gotten worse with Entertainment Weekly.) And to that last subject, I dedicate this post.
100 Million Songs were legally downloaded from the itunes music store this week. That's a major milestone. I think it's friggin' awesome. After all the bitchin' and moanin' about napster and kazaa, someone figured out (Steve Jobs) that if you make downloads legal, people WILL pay.
I read an article once that summed up what I thought about downloading (back when it was only illegal) pretty well. It's about the music, stupid. I can't find the article anymore (although this catch-phrase has been thrown about in other places to mean the same thing). Basically, the point was that if artists would make "albums," that is, full, complete streams of songs that flowed together and stood for one complete puzzle that made a comprehensive picture as well as each individual piece standing on its own, people would not mind paying $15-$18 a pop. But people DON'T want to pay that much for a collection of radio-friendly pop trash strung together without regard for the quality of the whole, or about 80% of the individual tracks. No one wants to buy a whole "album" for one or two songs. I never downloaded stuff, back in the illegal days, for which I really wanted the whole album. I still bought that stuff. I only downloaded crap pop tracks that were fun for their sheer awfulness, that I knew possessing an entire album of would not allow me to live with myself. (I'm not knocking pop trash too much; I have some guilty pleasures, I just recognize that artistically, it's not the best music out there, it's just fun.) So, the moral of the article was, if you can put together "albums" of quality material, artists, people will buy them; if you keep stringing crap together, with one or two radio-friendly tunes, we're going to steal it (more or less LOL).
Well, itunes led the pack in the digital music revolution. Their on-line store has an EXCELLENT selection of all the stuff you'd want to hear, and a bunch of stuff you've never heard of, that they don't play on the radio. It's phenomenal. I took my back issues of EW last night and downloaded some stuff they recommended as well as just some single tracks I knew I wanted from the radio. It's $.99 a pop for the single songs, $9.90 for most albums. You can listen to 30 second samples of the songs. The cost is less than buying the CD, plus you already have it in digital format (saves the step of uploading your CDs to your computer, a daunting task I know well). If you have fast internet, it's a cinch. If you don't care as much about liner notes, it's a great way to get the newest albums at a lesser cost, all from the comfort of your home. And unlike illegal downloading, you know what you're getting. . .no skipping, no half-tracks, no errors as were made when you were file-sharing with other users.
Oh, and just because Apple leads the way doesn't mean itunes (and ipod, the best MP3 player on the market) is only for Apple users. itunes and ipod are for windows users as well. At $.99 a pop, for the known quality of the tunes you love, without the hassle of illegality, why shouldn't we pay?
