It was a long time coming, but I recently made my first purchases from the iTunes Music Store. Beck is releasing his new album at the end of next month, and to whet fans’ appetites, he is selling remixes of four of the album’s songs exclusively on the iTMS. (To be fair, he released ‘em on vinyl too, but who’s got time for that?)
Normally, remixes I can do without. But after listening to the 30-second samples on the iTMS, I had to have them. The two that are remixed by a group named Paza sound as if the instrumental tracks from the originals have been stripped out and replaced by muzak created on a Commodore 64 computer. (If you have iTunes installed on your computer, you too can listen in.) Bleeps, blurps, sawtooth waves and percussion crafted from sharply modulated bursts of white noise: the synthesized sounds of my youth. Sweet!
Yet my purchases were not made without hesitation because, although I think the iTMS is well-executed and a fine way of boosting Apple’s standing in the PC world, a few things were holding me back:
- When you buy music online, you get compressed tracks. In other words, they’re not CD quality. If you want to burn them to a CD or convert them to another digital format, you aren’t able to do so without a substantial loss in audio quality.
- When I pay for music like CDs, I appreciate having a physical object in my possession. Not only the CD itself, but typically an informative booklet with production and recording credits, source of samples (if any), lyrics (sometimes), along with nice design and photos.
- I’m not so keen on Apple’s DRM (digital rights management), which restricts you from playing iTMS music on certain devices and certain other computers. While I appreciate the sentiment that they don’t want you pirating music, I also don’t like my purchases saddled like that. Fortunately, some enterprising individuals, not without some legal wrangling with Apple, have found a way around these RIAA-inspired shenanigans.
In the end, it came down to the fact that I still don’t plan on buying a lot of iTMS music, and anyway, the tracks are only 99 cents each. If you’re buying a whole album, that’s not typically a good deal, but for a few tracks not available in any other format usable by me, I could make an exception.