I'm finally doing well enough financially in this apartment to afford myself some luxuries. In addition to funding an old hobby, I've also begun purchasing music online. My first purchase was the song "Greeting Committee" by The Pillbugs. I had heard this psychedelic rock song over my store's MUZAK station (FM1 for the win!) for a while and was not able to find it in any online searches despite having nearly all the lyrics to the song. Eventually after going back to the MUZAK site and checking their now-playing list throughout the day, I found it (score another victory for the brute-force method). With the title and artist in hand, I did another Google search and it yielded fruit. Without hesitation I signed up for LaLa.com and bought the song. No hassles. Just gave them my business e-mail address and my credit card information and 99¢ later, the song was mine.
A few months goes by and I decide that I want to start purchasing songs. It turns out that LaLa had gone out of business since then but I was recommended iLike.com on the out-of-business page. I signed up for them and promptly bought ten songs that day. Again, no muss, no fuss. Just 99¢ a song and that was it. However, iLike doesn't have every song I'm looking for but it will direct me to iTunes since they have it. I didn't want to sign up for another site but I wanted the song so I decided iTunes could be my alternate.
And that's when I ran into trouble...
For some reason, it is not enough to simply sign up for iTunes. I must also download some program first. WHY?! Neither LaLa nor iLike requires that I download a program to get their music. It's a simple transfer of data after my purchase is completed. But no, iTunes has to be fucking difficult. Now I'm sure there's no problem with the thing they want to download, but it's the principle of it all. I don't want to download it and it's already been shown that it is entirely unnecessary to have such a program on my computer in the first place. I want to buy the music I want legally. I really do. I'm one of those guys who believes in paying for the music I own. I don't like giving it away either. At best, I'm like a drug dealer who will give you a sample, but you'll have to buy the rest on your own if you really like it. :-)
In the end, I opted out. I refused to download the service and now I'm wanting for certain songs. It turns out that I lost most of my Paul McCartney singles. I was gonna make a better version (in my opinion) of his All The Best compilation. I put songs I ripped from CDs that I then discarded into that folder. Later, my computer became so unstable that I had to reset it to factory settings. I ditched that folder in my frenzied back-up thinking it was just the songs from the All The Best album. Oops!
I first tried getting them illegally (I once owned the albums, that was my justification) but it seems I can't even do that right. I got the .rar for his Flaming Pie album but I couldn't unRAR it, because I didn't have the password. What the fuck?! So I ended up paying for the two songs I wanted off that album. The songs I couldn't get off of iLike are available on iTunes which just sucks... Anyone who has "Too Many People", "My Brave Face", and "Put It There"...I'd be much obliged.
iTunes, seriously, the trick to making it so that people don't steal the product you're offering is to both offer a consistently high-quality sound file and to do so WITHOUT UNNECESSARY HURDLES, but no...you've decided to go the asshole route...
No comments:
Post a Comment