Apple dragged the music industry another step toward the future today, announcing the new iTunes Music Store and a new slimmer, swankier line of iPod portable music players.
The new iTunes Music Store offers downloads for 99 cents a track, or $9.99 for full albums. Definitely attractive price points for me, especially considering that I spend the most time listening to music on my powerbook. The savings might be enough to make me forego the liner notes and such. The selection of songs isn't bad, though there are clearly a lot of bands that aren't represented. This manifests itself on both ends of the spectrum, with no tracks from big acts like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull as well as no tracks from smaller label acts like Flogging Molly and NOFX -- not that NOFX is a new band or anything. (I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bran Van 3000 had one track listed, though.)
The iTunes site stores your credit card information, so ordering is devilishly easy... when you click "buy it" the music quickly downloads right into the iTunes player. Unfortunately for most folks (Apple included), the service is mac-only at this point. Another bummer is that the files sold are AAC, which is basically MP4. This isn't a bad thing if you play all your music on your mac or iPod, or even if you burn CDs for listening on other devices. It does make it somewhat difficult to use some older portable MP3 players, though. All this might get more people to buy macs and iPods, but probably just means a smaller audience for Apple. In the end, they'll do what they've always done -- blaze the trail so others can get fat off the new territory.
Even with some shortcomings, I'm sure that I'll be purchasing more music from the iTunes store in the future. That's right, I said "more." Tonight I picked up some Eminem for me and some Tori Amos for the missus. (And I wonder why our TiVo is confused.)
"The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about - namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home."
In this case, it's not the government doing the blacklisting, but the type of intolerance and generally jingoistic flag-waving that's been going around is rather unnerving.
Going to Buck's for brunch with Kerah and Mark. (Like you care.)
:: Keith 10:22 [link] :: ::
:: Thursday, April 24, 2003 ::
Baby blues
Babycenter.com says, "Most Caucasian babies are born with dark blue eyes and their true eye color -- be it hazel, green, or blue -- may not reveal itself for weeks or months." Astute readers will note that we're up to 38 weeks. In the immortal words of H.I. McDonnough in Raising Arizona, "We're set to pop here, honey." Man, I cannot wait to be a Dad!
:: Keith 00:07 [link] :: ::
Technorati.com has a cool feature for newshounds that lists stories that are most linked from recent blog postings, with snippets of the blog commentary. They use an interesting ranking algorithm that only looks at posts from the past two hours, so there's a good amount of churn on the stories listed. If you're interested in longer-term indexes of popular blog links, check out Blogdex or Daypop.
:: Keith 22:54 [link] :: ::