2005-08-27 #1

Listen/Move at the iTunes Store (and Buying Silence)

A chunk of the Atomic City catalogue is now available for online purchase at the iTunes store, including our very own Listen/Move (just search for "cassiel"). You can now buy any "song" from the album for a mere $0.99 or 79p. Anyone familiar with the album knows that it is structured as two "timelines" of continuous audio, so I'm not sure what happens to the crossfades if one purchases a contiguous selection of tracks (or, for that matter, the entire album). Since I'm opposed to proprietary DRM schemes, technological lock-in, and the balkanisation of formats for my music collection on principle, I don't intend to find out.

The flat-fee policy for "songs" is interesting. Pro: it's easy to remember a single price for everything. Con: artists may not make long tracks available for purchase, since this would be too good a deal (but regardless of that, there's a system-imposed cutoff at around 10 minutes so it's not possible to offer long "songs"). I note, though, that one can cough up for an arbitrarily short song, and -- yes! -- for my 79p I can buy a six-second pause track by Benny Goodman or Billie Holiday.