iTunes

iTunes is my nemesis.  It's partly my fault - ever since I went legit with my internet music, I've been buying from iTunes, and so I have to admit that I'm buying what they're selling.  Still, the things iTunes is, and the things I want it to be are so similar and yet so different that it drives me mad.

This came up because I was thinking about a couple of old Kinks songs I used to have on my computer before it crashed.  "All Day and All of the Night" which is my "You Really Got Me" (seriously, how can anyone prefer "You Really Got Me"?  "All Day..." is vastly superior) and Dave Davies solo song "Death of a Clown."  Dave Davies song has always gotten to me, even though in many ways its obvious and clumsily written, just for the piano opening with the weird effect on the notes.

So I decide to buy those songs, rekindle a little nostalgia.  I find them, buy them, and then (and only then) discover that these are not the songs I thought I was buying.  Actually, they are, but it's complicated - they are rerecorded versions of those classic songs, because whoever owns the Kinks catalog (definitely not the Kinks) isn't selling the songs online.  For reasons unknown.  (Seriously, what Luddite is going, "The way to maximize the earnings from this back catalog is to not sell them over the most popular music service ever."

So I get "Death of a Clown" but not the "Death of a Clown" I remember, with the bittersweet piano intro, but a rough acoustic version (which honestly isn't bad, but it's like taking pistachio ice cream when you really wanted chocolate) and a live version of "All Day and All of the Night" performed in the eighties.

Compound this with the fact that I bought a used Zune cheap a while back (I'm poor) and a large proportion of my songs I bought from iTunes won't play on it.  I purchased the songs, and they won't let me play them on a competing platform.  Instead, they are charging me $80 to update all of my old songs to the new iTunes Plus format without DRM.

This business model strikes me as weirdly as the not-Kinks model - "We'll sell people music, but trick them into buying music they didn't mean to buy, and then charge them extra if they want to play the music they bought and own on another piece of hardware."

I'm holding out, but I don't know for how much longer it makes sense.  They're never going to budge, and if I buy from Zune, I'm in the same bind, but backwards.

Too bad no one else has gotten into digital music, someone without a history of abusing their customers.