I was talking to a good friend of mine from Washington, D.C. last weekend about the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) and the number of songs/albums we had purchased and realized something that hadn’t occurred to until then: I am buying music again. Record companies are once again getting my hard earned dollars, $0.99 at a time, but it’s adding up. Until the iTunes Music Store launched I would pick up a CD or two a year — and that was only when I was at a mall and bored waiting for my wife and kids. I don’t spend much time watching MTV or listening to the radio, so I never really knew what was happening in the music industry. To be honest, I was quite content to put in my Ozzy CDs and skip the music on MTV altogether.
I have very wide ranging taste in music, everything from Beethoven (Herbert von Karajan’s rendition of the Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic is the best I’ve ever heard) to every Ozzy album I can get my hands on. iTMS has not only given me all of this music, but it has also broadened my horizons.
I certainly haven’t spent the large amounts of money that I’ve heard other people spending, but the music companies did get $700 from me that they wouldn’t have received before.
That $700 bought me what is probably some of the worst songs available on the music store, but I just couldn’t pass up C.W. McCall’s, Convoy, or Turn Up the Radio from Autograph. Of course, I also picked up some classics from Aretha Franklin and Elton John, while rounding out my collection with AC/DC, Zakk Wylde, Megadeth, 3 Doors Down and the new Avril.
No matter how you slice it, the iTunes Music Store has been good all the way around. My tastes are expanding and I’m able to pick up some of the oldies that I’ve wanted and the music companies are once again making money from me. To round it out, Apple has another revenue stream to get a few of my hard earned dollars.