Okay! Alright! Take my money! TAKE IT!!!
Remember when the iTunes music store was first introduced? It also introduced chaos, as file traders the world over took to the streets, protesting the re-introduction of having to pay money for music. There was looting, public beheadings, cutting in line and under-tipping waiters. It was horrible.
None of that actually happened, unfortunately, but there was a decent amount of debate about whether people who had the ability to use peer-to-peer software to get the same albums for free would bother shelling out perfectly good American dollars for the same music that had sharing protection coded on it. What's the expression? Why buy the milk at home when you can get the cat for free? That's not it...why send the kids to school when you can buy the car for free? No...I can't remember.
Anyway, I got a very good lesson in why it is we've all been throwing our money at iTunes: because I spent TWO HOURS last night with Limewire trying to find TWO albums. I had to wade through a pile of mis-labeled tracks, I had to try multiple times to get songs because the person who the file belonged to would log off, and then I had to re-label all of the songs once I had them in iTunes. This is exactly why we buy stuff off of iTunes: in five minutes, I could have had the same two albums, and they would have been nicely labeled and have good sound quality, and I just would have had to part with just over $20. Money. What can't it do?
For those of you keeping score at home, the two albums were I Am A Bird Now by Antony & the Johnsons and the self-titled debut album by the Ditty Bops. The former still sounds ridiculous, but I'm beginning to warm to the general sad-soul feel of the music. The latter is fun, but on first listen, I'm not sure there's really enough to the songs to keep my interest. But still...I went to all that trouble to lather and rinse; you'd better believe I'm going to repeat.
1 comment:
Well, just the other day I was dicking around looking for the infamous "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot basement tapes". So far as I can tell, you can't buy them anywhere. Certainly not on iTunes store. There's a little site called etree.org which uses a P2P network to exchange (mostly) concert recordings folks have made. The artists all have agreed to allow their shows and other recordings to be exchanged in this nature. And it's totally free. So I found the basement tapes there. The only trick is, the files can only be recognized by a winamp player, and requires a small free plug in. You can then use your winamp player to burn it to a disc, and it's all gravy from there.
I gave up on limewire a long time ago for the reasons you mentioned, and this is the only time I've ever used a p2p to get music since then. I HIGHLY recommend this, though. Those basement tapes are shit hot.
Generally, though, you're right. p2p sucks, and can sometimes take a reallly long time to get the wrong song. It just isn't worth it. I promise you, though, this is.
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