JeffSay…

Buy it!

Related: Must have album: Raising Sand

Wal-Mart is offering DRM-free music downloads in MP3 format for $.94. They claim that you can “download to any player” and that may be true but I tried to buy a track from Wal-Mart and guess what? It doesn’t work on a Mac.

When I go to the Wal-Mart catalog and click “Check out MP3 music” in their flash thingy I get the following:

Everyone claims that Wal-Mart’s new Windows-only DRM-free MP3 download service is a competitor to iTunes but I don’t see how.

Update:

Wal-Mart also seems to not play well with any browser but Internet Explorer.

Firefox users can still use the “original” store which, apparently, isn’t as feature-rich as their new store. I don’t know what their new store looks like or what sort of features it has because when I tried to open it in Internet Explorer 7, it just showed a blank page with the error icon in the lower-left of the window with “Done” next to it.

An absolute must-have album is Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Just by listening to the horrible quality previews on Amazon I know that I just have to have it.

Amazon.com: Raising Sand: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

Other upcoming music purchases:

Amazon.com: Play It as It Lays: Patti Scialfa
Amazon.com: The Awakening: Melissa Etheridge

I’m really excited about the Patti Scialfa’s Play It As It Lays, too. I loved everything about her last release, 2004′s 23^rd Street Lullaby and I expect that this new album will be just as good.

Madonna’s new track, “Hey You” is currently available free of charge in WMA and MP3 format on MSN’s Live Earth page.  The page says it’ll be available free for seven days but I’m not sure how long it’s been up already.  Scurry over quick like a bunny and download it.

“Hey You” was produced in collaboration with Pharrell Williams and while it’s not my favorite Madonna song, it’s good.  It’s maybe a 4/5.

Keith Richards, in an interview with the British magazine NME stated that he had snorted some of his dead father’s ashes with his daily (hourly? every fourth minute?) cocaine ration.

“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

“He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said. “… It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

Keith Richards: ‘I snorted my father’ – USATODAY.com

Update:

MacNN reports that Apple is going to begin to credit users for the singles they’ve purchased if they buy the whole album within a certain amount of time:

Apple, in conjunction with several music labels, is planning to offer iTunes users credit for songs already purchased when they choose to buy an associated album within a certain time frame, according to the New York Times.

MacNN | Apple may credit iTunes album purchases

Original post:
Another post about the iTunes Store.

I’ve previously bought four tracks from an album. The album costs $9.99. I’ve paid $3.96 already, but if I want to go and buy the whole album (instead of buying each track individually), I’ll be charged a full $9.99 and then have duplicate tracks. To avoid the duplicate tracks I’ll have to buy each track separately for a total of $8.91. When you total what I will have paid, I’ll have paid $12.87 for a $9.99 album.

iTunes knows what you’ve purchased already (it warned me when I clicked “add album” that I had already purchased portions of the album), and it should just go ahead and subtract those tracks from the total price of the album and prevent you from re-downloading them. How hard could that be?

Perhaps it’s my own fault for not buying the whole album in the first place, but I didn’t want the whole album then. I do now and I’ll probably wind up paying the extra money for the whole thing, I just don’t think I should have to.

For anyone who cares, the album I’ve partially purchased is The Grascals.

I find it hard to believe that Bonnie Tyler‘s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is 24 years old this year.   Oh, I can do the math, but it just doesn’t seem that old.Oh, she has a new greatest hits compilation out now in the UK: From the Heart: Greatest Hits.  She’ll be in Los Angeles and Las Vegas in November for performances.

New Releases, Concerts and TV Performances | BonnieTyler.com
Total Eclipse Of Everything | Extrageographic.org 

A friend sent me this in iChat:

[Mary Bono] benefits financially whenever ["I Got You Babe" is] played on the radio, used in a commercial, bought on a CD, downloaded from iTunes, shown in a movie like “Groundhog Day”, played on the muzak at an Old Navy store, covered “ironically” by a punk band, sold as sheet music to a beginning pianist, …

May I Nominate Mary Bono For “Jackass Of The Week”? — Thought Palace

Note the bold part. This intrigued me so I opened iTunes and ran a search for “I Got You Babe” and it was the funniest set of results ever. Great covers include those by The Dictators, Etta James, and Gay and Gabe. Tiny Tim chimes in with his freakish cover, too.

There’s even a bluegrassy version and check out this bit of random.

The Best iTunes Store Search EVAH!

Update: I just heard the UB40 version on the radio. How bizarre.

Okay so Britney has gone and shaved her head but what’s out of control about that? I mean, if the bitch wasn’t out of control before, why does cutting off all of her hair suddenly thrust her outside the norm?

If she’d shown up with a jagged, half-shaven head that looked like she’d done it herself in the car then I’d be more understanding, but her head is, from all indications, perfectly shaved. Why does this suddenly make her crazy if nothing she’s done prior did?

Oh yeah, Miss Thang needs to check her own hair “style” before criticizing others’.

abc7.com: Southern California news leader – Britney’s New Look Is Bald

Sure there’s no animal in her dress, but Imogen Heap showed up at the Grammys Sunday night in a dress weird enough to justify the comparison.