Inspirational Technology

Spymac iTunes Music Sharing

Spymac has created a directory for people sharing their iTunes music libraries. This is a fascinating use of this technology, and is very cool. Unfortunately, I suspect Spymac is just asking for trouble with it.

One kind of interesting thing about poking around in other peoples music libraries is how untidy they tend to be. Yet another cost of using P2P systems to get the files.

Tonight I went through and tried to replace the few P2P acquired tracks I have with legal copies from the iTMS. Not really very successful, I was only able to find five of the 20 or so that I looked for. All the tracks were for VERY popular music, this is the only thing I've ever bothered using P2P systems for. So I'd say the iTMS still has a way to go before it can be a good solution for replacing these things. Anyway, of the 7,715 tracks in my library, 18 are currently from P2P networks and will be replaced as soon as they're made available on iTMS.

I think my opinion of iTMS is changing. I still think it's too expensive and the DRM sucks, but it's just so damn easy to use. I swore I would never pay $.99 for a song, but so far I've bought 5 individual tracks and even worse 5 full albums through iTMS. This is the result of pent up demand and I won't be buying much else for a while since I really can't afford this right now. What albums did I buy? Heh, heh, 2 Eminem Albums, the 8 Mile soundtrack, Kruder & Dorfmeister G-Stoned and James Brown 20 greatest hits. The K&D and James Brown were impulse buys, the Eminem I'd actually wanted for a while.

One other interesting observation is that even though, in the last week, I've added roughly 1,800 tracks to my iTunes collection (I'm aggressively ripping my CD collection). 19 of the top 25 most played all time were purchased from iTMS. The other six were from eMusic.