> curiosity, I just asked a friend to look for 11 bands that I 
> like and he
> didn't find a single one on there.  

They only have about 200,000 songs on it now, but are saying they are going
to add a ton more soon.  There's a rumor flying around that they are trying
to buy Universal Music for $6 billion.  If they have the rights to all of
Universal's library, that will likely bring in a pretty penny for Apple.
There were a couple of things I was looking for that I didn't find on there
(Zero 7, Blue Six, the first Portishead album, etc).  But, it's not very
mainstream stuff either.  

It seems to me that Apple has just positioned itself to become a major
record label on their own.  They have the means to distribute anything they
want, and they don't have to worry about print and distribution costs at
all.  It would be interesting to see them come out with a service similar to
Amazon's self-publishing service, where independent artists could upload
their tracks, and take a cut of whatever gets sold.  

Someone asked if it worked with non-iTunes software.  Nope.  At least not
yet.  I can't imagine it would be too hard to reverse engineer it and come
out with a program for linux that would interface with the site.  It's
simply HTML inside of a frame in iTunes.  You'd need to somehow interface it
with an audio player that could play AAC files that have DRM though.  The
DRM is fairly unrestrictive.  Basically, the only thing iTunes won't let you
do is convert it to another format directly.  You can burn it to CD if you
want and re-rip your burned CD.  Converting compressed audio is just a bad
idea anyway, but the only portable player that will play the files is the
iPod.  Speaking of which, the new iPod is sweet.  It's smaller than the old
version, and has an all touch interface, no moving buttons.

Jay

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