Apple’s New Music Store
I’ve been playing with Apple’s new music store for the last 24 hours and have the following thoughts.

First, I think Apple has missed its target audience with this product. Either that or I suddenly have fallen out of the bulls-eye target market. I don’t think the latter is possible as everything else they release makes me drool. But this one missed for me and here is why. I love the Apple aesthetic, the design, the entire lifestyle – slap me and put a Apple tattoo on my ass. When I buy an apple product, a computer or a piece of software, I really like to eat it up. I love the boxes they come in, the manuals, the smell of the plastic bags that once held a memory upgrade. Apple knows this about its market (about me) and usually caters to it without flaw.

I carry this same appreciation to my music buying and appreciating. I love not only the music on an album but the the whole album – the liner notes, lyrics, sleeve design, even the damn thank you’s and the bar code. I need it all. Although I like the instant gratification of downloading digital music, without the proper context of the offline CD or album, something is lost. Because Apple’s new music store currently fails to allow me to both download songs and buy the album for my own archives and appreciation, it is failing to allow for my full appreciation of an artists product.

It seems to me that the current Apple music store would be greatly enhanced by aligning themselves with an offline/online music retailer such as Amazon. Then I could both download the tracks of an album for instant gratification and receive the actual physical album a week later. Better yet it would be great to get a digital download of the tracks and then receive the physical copy in another format like vinyl. That would be awesome. I would even pay a few bucks more for that.

Another disconnect between the Apple music store and my music tastes and needs becomes abundantly clear when I search for more eccentric artists. I’m sorry but you can only own so many R.E.M, U2, and EMINEM albums. And the artists that I am able to find aren’t entirely accessible through the Apple store because their albums contain song tracks that break the five minute barrier, thus making them unavailable for download. So you are limited to top 40 artists that have songs under five minutes. Boring. And at 99 cents a song, I am unmoved to purchase anything. I know I’m a cheap bastard but it doesn’t help Apple cause to know that the most downloaded songs on their service are also the most easy to get using any free piece of shareware such as Acquisition or Lime-wire.

So to wrap things up: new Apple music store – useless, overpriced and boring. New ipod: Looking pretty smooth.