First Music Store Purchases

After a couple days of unsuccessful attempts to register my credit card with Apple, their Musc Store finally cooperated this morning. I can’t blame them – ain’t nothin’ worse than trying to get financial systems to talk to, well, anything else, much less handle presumably a whole frickin’ bunch of transactions per second. But now it works like a charm, and I bought two songs to test it out: “The Big Country” by Talking Heads and “Sweet Jane (Live)” by The Velvet Underground.

As I mentioned, there’s not a lot of stuff for my odd musical palette up there (yet?), but there are a few old tracks like these that I’ve wanted a clean copy of. The downloads were absurdly fast, maybe 20 seconds on the campus connection, the iTunes integration “just worked,” and sound quality is excellent. Worth $0.99/song? Hell yes. Giving up on Emusic? Hell no, not until Apple has at least as good a selection of small labels, which doesn’t look to be their focus at all. Still, the Music Store is recommended.