iTunes
Apple launched the iTunes Music Store today, which is nice. Songs cost 79 pence (or €0.99), and albums cost £7.99 (€9.99), and can be played on the iPod, on your PC, or burnt to a CD. You could, of course, just buy the CD from somewhere like cd-wow for about the same price, and then you have a CD that you can rip or play on any PC/stereo that you like, share with your friends in the colonies, and generally be free of corporate tendrils. But enough of such grumpy luddism; without such technological advancements, we’d probably all still be listening to tapes.
So far, euroTunes has a paltry 700,000 songs available, and browsing the store (you’ll need to download iTunes for that) shows quite a few placeholder pages, with no tracks available to buy, and generally the place feels as if it’s a store that’s closing down instead of starting up. They have competition from Napster, Coca-Cola, OD2, Sony, and wippit.com, which is rare in that it offers happy mp3s for download instead of nasty DRMed Windows Media Audio files.
Apparently, a number of major UK bands will not be available:
http://www2.vnunet.com/lite/News/1155891
Ah, yes, I noticed that. No Franz Ferdinand, no White Stripes :(
What exactly do they think British ipod owners listen to? Sugababes?
Apparently Apple has failed to reach a deal with the independent labels as yet (not really an issue in America, where everything is in the grip of soulless, grasping corporations, naturally)