"Don't Steal Music," Redux

When Apple announced yesterday that they were plunging into the turbulent and financially murky waters of online music, my first reaction was, "Why?" The music industry's going down in flames, and rightfully so: years of shilling massively overpriced crap to increasingly cynical consumers have finally caught up , and the results aren't pretty. Meanwhile, online filesharing has mutated into a ten-thousand-pound mecha-gorilla that's broken every legal leash that's been tossed at it and throttled every unsuspecting record company that's wandered too close to its cage. You don't mess with that gorilla voluntarily. And, as Sony has demonstrated so nicely, you certainly don't mess with that gorilla if you're trying to sell portable music devices at the same time.

So, why? The iPod is sheer brilliance as far as design and useability goes, and all Apple had to do was build in some minor constraints to keep it from being used to transfer songs from one computer to another and slap a "Don't Steal Music" sticker on the front, and that was it: presto, the best MP3 player in the universe. And if some college student sucked up university bandwith to get some of his thousand songs from Kazaa, well, hey, that wasn't Apple's fault. Why screw with a good thing for the sake of the black-hearted record labels and risk turning the glorious iPod into Sony's digital Walkman, a schizophrenic device so hamstrung by internal copy-protection restraints that it may as well be sobbing helplessly on its therapist's couch?

But Apple was doing it, and since Apple's proven to have a better understanding of how consumers actually USE their stuff than any manufacturing company I've ever seen, I had to give it a try. So here's how it went:

Last night, I downloaded iTunes 4. I browsed around the Apple Music Store. I saw they had a couple exclusive tracks by U2 and Counting Crows. I listened to thirty-second samplings of said tracks, then bought a few, for ninety-nine cents each. With my high-speed cable connection, I had them on my hard drive in about ten seconds each. Total average transaction time? Maybe a minute and a half. Even better, I could get that catchy Matchbox Twenty single that I heard on the radio and not have to suffer the near-fatal embarrassment that would come with actually buying the album.

(At this point, I have to mention the brilliance of Apple's pricing. It's not $1.00 per song: it's $0.99. Consumer sees $0.99, they think, damn, I've got that much floating in my couch. The effect that that one cent can have on sales, especially on impulse purchases, can't be exaggerated.)

Now I'm listening to Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," which I'd been meaning to buy for a while, and which was available on the Music Store for $9.99 (not $10.00, note). If I went to Virgin and bought it, I'd be lucky if I walked out with it for under fifteen bucks, after taxes, and then there's the travel time, ripping time, time spent messing with that goddamn sticker, etc., etc. Instead, I bought it this morning as I sat at the computer in my underwear and had it playing in under five minutes. iTunes even downloaded the cover art automatically, and you know how I feel about cover art. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of purchasing online an album I could have downloaded for free when Wilco put it on their website after their current label refused to release it. That's part of the reason I bought it; I'm a big fan of irony.

So anyway, this looks like it could be a good thing, despite the drawbacks. Is $0.99 for a single and $9.99 for an album still way overpriced? Yes; not as bad as it would be in the store, but still enough to be insulting. Could I have downloaded the same thing for free through Acquisition? Yes, given the time and patience to find the track and deal with dropped connections and the requisite multiple downloads after the first attempt had lousy sound quality and the second cut off unexpectedly halfway through. Is it a bit much of Steve Jobs to think this new service will set the world on fire when it currently works only on Apple's iTunes (though a PC version is coming soon) and iPods, and Apple only has about 3% of the market share? Yeah, a bit. Is the whole thing useless if you don't have a high-speed Internet connection? Yeah, but if you're still on dial-up, then you're probably still hunting your food with sharp rocks, and downloading the latest Eminem single is the least of your problems. Will I occasionally have to contend with the awful gut-wrenching feeling of waking up bleary after a night at the pub to find that I now have Kelly Clarkson's entire catalog sprawled on my hard drive? Undoubtedly. There's certainly more than a few kinks in the system.

But it's a hell of a good start.