The Internet

When you’re talking about downloading music, Amazon, iTunes and eMusic are great because of the selection - you can get just about anything you might want, you can preview the tracks, and they’re on your computer for a small price legally in just a few seconds (depending on your download speed).  They’re huge marketplaces - kind of like the big box stores of music.  But part of the allure of a music store (at least for the hardcore fan) is going in and finding things you weren’t looking for, lurking beneath the radar.  Sure, setting up an online music store is a difficult proposition when you take into account licensing, hardware needs, and so on, but the wide-open possibilities can surely include the boutique music store as well, right?

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Congress might consider a bill that requires camera phones to click when they take a picture.  There’s no shutter or anything that makes a noise in a digital camera - it’s more of a function of notifying people when the picture is actually being taken.  One can only wonder that if that bill had already been passed, would we have seen that photo of Michael Phelps partaking in herbal delight?  Do we also need a flashing red light indicating audio recording to keep Christian Bale from raining rants down on all he might survey?

Not everybody watches the MacWorld keynote addresses with baited breath, and that’s quite all right.  Everybody has more important things to do with your life.  However, today’s announcement that iTunes was going free of digital rights management is huge for a couple of reasons:

1. Apple is finally ditching the process that tethers its songs to the iPod and iTunes, meaning more customers can use the service.
2. It’s finally caught up to services like Amazon’s mp3 store and eMusic, and the files it offers should be better sounding than others (based on bit rate and file format - I can’t guarantee the quality of individual tracks).

The big question now for me is whether tracks that have already been purchased from the iTunes store will be liberated from their previous bonds.  The conversion process is scheduled for completion by the end of March, so hopefully it will be addresses following that time.

If you’ve received a new digital media player this holiday season or you’re just now looking at buying music online, you’re faced with a decision as to whether you’ll buy the actual files from places like iTunes or Amazon or subscribe to a music service like Rhapsody or Microsoft’s Zune Pass.  The correct answer depends on how you listen to your music.

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