It just had to be, didn’t it?
Please, no more.
Apple announced the other day that downloads from its Itunes service had hit the one billion mark. The billionth downloaded track? Why, it was Speed of Sound by arch-mediocrists C*play. The poor, miserable sod who had the misfortune to download this track was an American teenager, who completely by accident, I assume, downloaded it as part of the whole of an album that was described by critics who like going to fancy parties and who want to get closer to Gwyneth as “brilliant”, and by those in the know as “less fun than scraping week old fat drippings from a seive”. To make up for the disappointment of downloading such tosh, he receives an iMac, lots of iPods, and $10K. The 10 iPods should come in handy if he ever wants to listen to the whole album without having to recharge the battery half way through, and the 10K should be enough to buy him all the music he needs to erase the memory of this dark hour, so I applaud Apple’s swift response to this appalling situation.
Such altruism and community-spiritedness, if continued, is set to cost Apple dear, however: currently top of their download chart is excruciating ex-army chalk-on-blackboard crooner James Blunt, with “You’re Bootiful”. There aren’t enough gifts and prizes in the world to get victims through the pain that track can inflict.
I’ve got to give Apple some credit in all of this, though. When the RIAA was closing down Audiogalaxy, and when Metallica were flying in to awards shows to complain that Napster users were stealing their property, I knew all along that music lovers (and Coldplay fans) would be willing to pay for music if the price was right, if it was easy to do, if the selection was good enough, and if they could be guaranteed the right quality of download. Sure enough, iTunes has shown this and then some, and even good old Napster are making money legally these days from downloads. It took way, way, too long, but eventually the penny seems to have dropped that downloads aren’t going to harm the record industry after all. Sales of CDs may be down nearly 20% year on year heading through 2005, but when you add on downloads, that gap starts to look a lot narrower.
