the daily snivel
This is one of those rare links I have to share. So, yes, I've become one of those obnoxious Macintosh people. And, yes, I'm excited about the iTunes Music Store, which is one of the first genuinely workable downloadable music retail concepts ever implemented. I'm a law student, and I have a cheap 56k dialup connection, so I don't download illegal music, unless, perhaps, it's merely "never recorded bootleg" illegal, and has never been digitally encoded on the underside of a CD by the starving artist in question. The iTunes store is presently available only in the US, and only for Macintosh users, but apparently it's going global and Windows friendly in the next month or two, as soon as iTunes 4 is ported to Windows.
Anyways, the point is that it's about time we had proper, legal, downloadable music for sale. The music industry has alienated scores of customers by first dragging its heels on on-line music purchasing, and then having the gall to sue students, grandparents, anybody, for sharing so much as one song on-line. On the other hand, sticky music retailing models are little better. Recently, Buymusic.com went on-line, and quickly made a shill of itself by offering music ONLY in WMA format, ONLY for Windows Internet Explorer users, and at widely varying prices with widely varying use restrictions. They have no plans to expand the service or the concept, and even redirect the users of other browsers and platforms to a cheerful "you're using the wrong browser/platform" page. Which, as you've read before in my various rants, is something that annoys me to no end. Standards, people. Standards. Accordingly, someone with too much time and too much vitriol has whipped up http://www.dontbuymusic.com/, which I stumbled across today. I try not to take sides in these sorts of things, but it actually made me laugh out loud. At work. Where I certainly shouldn't have been doing anything of the sort.
Also, I absolutely insist that you give a listen to some of the music by Brad Sucks. Especially his amazing song "Making me nervous," officially my favourite song of the week. It's free, legal, and nifty. Brad is also known as the Mad Hatter, genius behind The Fantastic Life and Suicide of Mr. Mary Holiday, whose exploits you can read of in my links section.
Comments:Anyways, the point is that it's about time we had proper, legal, downloadable music for sale. The music industry has alienated scores of customers by first dragging its heels on on-line music purchasing, and then having the gall to sue students, grandparents, anybody, for sharing so much as one song on-line. On the other hand, sticky music retailing models are little better. Recently, Buymusic.com went on-line, and quickly made a shill of itself by offering music ONLY in WMA format, ONLY for Windows Internet Explorer users, and at widely varying prices with widely varying use restrictions. They have no plans to expand the service or the concept, and even redirect the users of other browsers and platforms to a cheerful "you're using the wrong browser/platform" page. Which, as you've read before in my various rants, is something that annoys me to no end. Standards, people. Standards. Accordingly, someone with too much time and too much vitriol has whipped up http://www.dontbuymusic.com/, which I stumbled across today. I try not to take sides in these sorts of things, but it actually made me laugh out loud. At work. Where I certainly shouldn't have been doing anything of the sort.
Also, I absolutely insist that you give a listen to some of the music by Brad Sucks. Especially his amazing song "Making me nervous," officially my favourite song of the week. It's free, legal, and nifty. Brad is also known as the Mad Hatter, genius behind The Fantastic Life and Suicide of Mr. Mary Holiday, whose exploits you can read of in my links section.
