Troubles in iTunes Paradise?
By Chris Karr in Miscellaneous on Dec 14, 2006 3:54PM
Chicagoist loves the iTunes. When we purchased our first Mac back in 2002, iTunes was our favorite application for messing with our (then) ten gigs of MP3s. We previously used MusicMatch Jukebox, but iTunes simply beat the socks off of that and turned us into a die-hard Apple fan.
Over the last week, we've been following the story about iTunes Music Store sales. One research firm released a report saying that sales dropped 65% this year, while another found that sales increased by 84%. We're firmly aware of the statistic jujitsu that can be applied to arrive at these different numbers, and we're not sweating it. We don't expect the iTMS to go anywhere soon, and we will still be picking up the occasional track from the store.
However, we can't let this story pass by without sharing the observation that we've wanted to spend some cash in iTunes recently, but we have been constantly rebuffed by silly technical glitches in the system. We went on a Stargate bender earlier this year and all we need to claim completeness is to get caught up on this season's episodes. Trying to be good Internet citizens, we make an honest effort to pay for the content that we enjoy. However, the Stargate part of the store is broken and we've resorted to BitTorrent to get caught up. We don't know if our experience is common, but we can't help but think of it when some analyst begins sounding the death watch for the iTunes store.
We've also noticed that we're listening to less music these days. We jumped on the podcast bandwagon early, and while Adam Curry no longer is on our subscription list, we still have several hours a week of audio content in the form of geeky tech podcasts (Chicagoist loves TWiT) and NPR radio shows. We're using iTunes and our iPods more frequently, but that hasn't translated into more music listening.
In the end, we're still über-iTunes geeks and you will have to pry our iPods out of our cold dead hands. We've had some recent frustrations with the store, but not enough to get us started slumming with the Zune users.
Image credit: WadeB