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Pastimes : The Limelighters -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (127)	5/20/2003 5:57:06 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 140

My Jones Began With Tom - I couldn't take just one byte from Apple's iTunes. BY JAMES J. KERRIGAN - WSJ.com Tuesday, May 20, 2003 12:01 a.m. You and James should get together and start a "12 step" group, Ken. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, an evil serpent has led me to ruin with an Apple. Or maybe more appropriately Led Zeppelined me to ruin. The devil in this case is Apple's CEO Steve Jobs, and the dangerous fruit is Apple's new iTunes Music Store. After a frenzy of music collecting over the past 15 years, the pace of my compact disc purchases was finally beginning to slow down. This was due in large part to the fact that I already own everything available, with the exception of a seven-disc boxed set of Mongolian yak bleating that I haven't been able to justify buying (at least so far). But my musical restraint ended in late April, when Steve Jobs slithered down the Tree of Musical Knowledge and offered me a taste of no-longer-forbidden fruit. Jobs & Co. have developed something called, innocently enough, the Apple iTunes Music Store. I had never downloaded music from Napster or other Internet services before, because it was against the law and seemed complicated. Apple has solved both those problems with iTunes. For now it's available only to Macintosh users, but it's invading a PC near you by year-end. Armed with nothing more than a high-speed modem and a hideously large credit limit, you can log on to the iTunes Music Store and enslave yourself to the 200,000 available songs, all there for the grabbing at 99 cents a pop (or pop hit). Plunk down a buck, download a song in 10 seconds flat, then sit back and enjoy. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? So did crack cocaine. The analogies are eerie--both involve a pipe (in Apple's case, a broadband pipe), both are cheap, and both offer instant gratification. And both, unfortunately, can cause seemingly normal people to become unhinged. The first night after Apple unleashed this monster, I strolled (virtually) onto the site and did what I do in any CD store: I browsed around and listened to a couple of songs. No problems so far . . . but then I stumbled across the cheesy old Tom Jones hit "What's New Pussycat?" and figured it could be useful in chasing away unwanted party guests. I clicked the "Buy Now" button. Zap. Onto my hard drive it went, in less time than it took me to consider whether I really needed any Tom Jones. Too late--I owned it, like it or not. I could put it on my iPod, or start a "When Lounge Lizards Walked the Earth" CD compilation. It was too easy. I had to have more. I was hooked. So as the hours whizzed by, all non-iTunes reality faded away. I had been sucked into a Jobsian Vortex of Doom. Unlike a regular record store, this accursed thing never closes. It's open all night. "Open All Night" . . . wasn't that a Georgia Satellites song? (Click-zap.) Sleep? Who needs sleep? I can sleep when I'm dead, I thought. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" . . . Warren Zevon! (Click-zap.) By the time my wife shoved me out of my chair and started downloading Dolly Parton classics, I knew we were on our way to being the Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love of the iTunes set: descending into madness and wrestling for control of the mouse while the "Complete Works of The Troggs" wings its way through cyberspace and onto my hard drive. I started having visions of my formerly happy family living under a bridge while I sat by the road with a "Will Work for Downloads" sign made out of six months of unpaid Visa bills. At least there's some comfort in numbers. Apple reported one million downloads in the first week the service was available, and even though I was responsible for two-thirds of that volume, it's nice knowing I have some company out there. A support group can't be far behind. It's said that the first step on the road to recovery is realizing you're addicted. So I am publicly proclaiming that I'm a drinking man with an iTunes problem. I'll check myself in to the Steve Jobs Center for Musical Dependency, do my 30 days in the hole (Humble Pie! Click-zap) and get this Apple monkey off my back. In the meantime, there are only 147,362 songs left to buy. Mr. Kerrigan follows popular music from Fort Worth, Texas.