Recently I chanced upon a long lost gift card for Coconuts, a music chain eventually purchased by FYE. Stopped by the local FYE and it turns out that there was quite a bit of cash left. Given my musical tastes, I can never find anything in brick and mortar music stores these days. I just turned part of the gift card into $50 of iTunes Music Store credit.
Now that the iTMS has gone DRM free, I feel much more comfortable buying tracks from Apple. The real downer is having to use iTunes to search the store (it’s a damn website! stop trying to act like it’s not) and the fairly limited search even within iTunes.
As an example, I lean towards DJ mix, house music. In the late 80’s through most of the 90’s this genre was very label oriented. Artists were relatively unknown and even the known ones used lots of aliases. Labels represented particular flavors of house pretty reliably.
I was pleased to find that the iTMS had a number of tracks from the legendary Strictly Rhythm label. But there’s no way to discover the extent of the back catalog available because search by label doesn’t exist. I’m not going to sit there with a Strictly Rhythm discography and one-by-one figure out what tracks iTunes has. That’s what computers are for!
-1 on you iTunes Music Store!!
N.b. Amazon MP3s isn’t any better