Talk about the wrong audience…

I haven’t read Rolling Stone since I found myself bored enough to in High School.

It has nothing to do with the name, although I do have an almost instinctive dislike of the band… I’ve just found the articles to be about as valuable as those in a Playboy, minus the pictures. IMHO, the entire thing is nothing more than smoke and mirrors contributing to the overall level of entertainment industry propaganda composing your average issue.

So apparently, visiting the PNC Bank Arts Center recently got me a free subscription, and I gave it the full attention of one bowel movement. Cover story? Kanye West vs 50 Cent. Sub article? The endless war. A few pages in? An idiotic comment about Alberto Gonzales. Who really cares? I don’t listen to music for politics, I listen to it to be entertained.

Thus… If I’m reading a magazine covering entertainment, I don’t read it for POLITICS.

Ok, there’s an article on iTunes. Wow, so iTunes is the enemy of the music industry because it won’t go out of its way to rip off the consumer on its way to the 3rd biggest music outlet behind Best Buy and Walmart. I find it intriguing that Walmart is #2 considering how much of the music they sell is edited; but I digress.

What I got out of the article is that the Industry is hell-bent on destroying the #3 retailer of their product because Apple won’t yield to their idiotic business model that has been progressively FAILING since the advent of the compact disc. A few record companies and television networks are now talking about pulling their products from the iTunes store.

So the problem isn’t that they aren’t making any money – it’s that they’re not making enough. These complaints are ridiculous as the focus of the article is how iTunes has risen to the #3 retailer of music since it was introduced several years ago.

Another claim – illustrating the breadth of Industry intelligence… One rep assumes that the average iTunes user only has maybe 20 tracks, and that it can’t compete with ripping from CD’s or illegally sharing the tracks.

HELLO!?

I’ve got over 500 iTunes tracks. If I spent that $500 at Best Buy or Walmart I would have gotten DRASTICALLY fewer songs and albums. Anyone I know who actively uses iTunes has many more tracks than 20 – and haven’t bought a compact disc since they came to their senses.

iTunes is a successful business model. Apple may not make much money off it but the industry is. As much as the industry wants to fuck with the model and try to exploit the consumer even more, the only thing they can do – which has been proven by falling sales for longer than I care to remember – is make it fail.  It’s plain to anyone that a key reason that iTunes has succeeded is because they cash in on the only thing the industry has left – quantity.  Lord knows they gave up on Quality the moment NKOTB hit the stage.

So go ahead, kill iTunes. Sales will drop further, and I highly doubt after sucking the 99 cent teet for the past few years anyone is going to waste time at Best Buy or *bleeping* Wal-Mart.