Buying Music On Your Computer Is Old

“CUPERTINO, California — April 28, 2003 — Apple® today launched the iTunes® Music Store, a revolutionary online music store that lets customers quickly find, purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The iTunes Music Store offers groundbreaking personal use rights, including burning songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, listening to songs on an unlimited number of iPods, playing songs on up to three Macintosh® computers, and using songs in any application on the Mac®, including iPhoto™, iMovie™ and iDVD™.

‘The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use and to put music on an unlimited number of iPods for on-the-go listening,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. ‘Consumers don’t want to be treated like criminals and artists don’t want their valuable work stolen. The iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution for both.’

The iTunes Music Store features over 200,000 songs from music companies including BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and Warner. Users can easily search the entire music store to instantly locate any song by title, artist or album, or browse the entire collection of songs by genre, artist and album. Users can listen to a free 30-second high-quality preview of any song in the store, then purchase and download their favorite songs or complete albums in pristine digital quality with just one click.”
 — Not stealing music turned 10 years old yesterday. Where did the time go? I mean, I guess I know where it went, but thinking about it just gets me kind of down, in that ten years is an awfully long time in the life of a human being and if you actually take a moment to consider all you’ve done with the last decade it really makes you wonder: What was the point of all that? Even those few flashes of fun, were they worth all the suffering and tears? If someone came up to you right now and said, “I will let you live the last ten years over again, but you can’t change a single thing,” you would say, “Keep walking, buddy,” because even if your last ten years were awesome (and they weren’t) there was still much more bad than good in them, because that’s the way life works during any span of more than a couple days. So those ten years are gone, and now you’ve got to face the rest of them. Are they going to be any better than the previous decade? Don’t be stupid, of course not. Things will continue to suck — interspersed with increasingly brief moments of semi-satisfaction designed to somehow con you into not ending it all because the illusion that there is a chance things might get better is oddly powerful even though you know in your heart it is a bitter lie — until you die. Anyway, what was the first song you purchased on iTunes? I’ve switched computers a couple of times since then so it’s hard to tell exactly, but it looks like I either went for Tweet’s “Oops (Oh My)” or Trina’s “B R Right.”