iTunes Music Store VERSUS Tomoyasu Hotei

Saturday, July 10, 2004 » music thought

As Apple's iTunes Music Store hurtles rapidly toward 100,000,000 songs, I find myself wondering if there are five or six songs I could toss into my shopping cart in hopes of landing the grand prize. Nathan brought up a good point that I probably don't stand a chance against people willing to drop hundreds of dollars for a chance at winning (the grand prize, a 17-inch Powerbook, 40GB iPod and 10,000 song downloads, is worth about $13,000), but I see this as a fun excuse to blindly try out a handful of new artists.

So then Ken pointed out that there is a Tomoyasu Hotei album on iTMS. In case you don't know, Tomoyasu Hotei is an insane Japanese guitarist who is probably on my short list of the world's most awesome people. Anyway, this album, Electric Samurai (+1000 cool points right there), features 14 tracks of him rocking out, including "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" #2 and #3. After listening to a few of the samples, I added it to my shopping cart, figuring this would be a good way to increase my entries toward the 100 millionth song while allowing me to listen to it a little before I eventually order the actual album.

Then I paused and thought. To me, one of the reasons MP3s haven't completely replaced CDs is the fact that they're just files on the computer. I still like to have actual CDs. While it's very convenient that I can pay $10 for a high-quality, digital copy of an album on the iTunes Music Store, it doesn't come with a disc, liner notes, album art, or any of that. Even though I'll often download a new album to listen to, I still plan to buy physical versions of the ones I really like. So, while it may be practical to go to iTMS for new singles or individual tracks off otherwise mediocre albums, it doesn't make sense for full albums since I know I would eventually end up paying for the same album twice.

Of course, if I were to actually win the 10,000 free songs, that would probably complicate things.