“IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE" -ANDY WARHOL

In five short years, iTunes has become the #1 music retailer in the nation. We're supposed to believe that their success has nothing to do with the fact that they've made it easy and cut-rate cheap to legitimize the act of downloading music. With iTunes, instead of spending $18 on a product that you don’t really know if you want to commit to, you can sample each song, buy one track at a time, etc. It’s ideal and an absolute mandate for anyone like me who's old enough to remember being cheated out of our sacred heaps of nickels and dimes at Sam Goody as kids, buying albums on the strength of a single we'd heard on the radio, only to find out too late that what we'd heard was the only song on the album worth listening to. I think it's fair to say that the music biz built their empires throughout the 80's on that trick alone - look at the inexplicable surge and wild success of New Wave bands back (and MC Hammer) then. Is there any other explanation? I refuse to believe our parents' taste in music was simply that horrible. Maybe the cocaine was just really good in those days.

-www.craveonline.com
June 20 2008