It wasn't all me, I swear! I stopped after 124 songs (at an average
price of $0.74), mostly because I want to have *some* money left
when I leave for Las Vegas next weekend. :-)

In the process I stumbled across a number of things that suggest
Apple is willing to let the labels tinker with the pricing and
availability to see what works, or to give them almost enough
rope to hang themselves. I've found complete albums that are only
available track-by-track, tracks that are only available if you
buy the complete album, albums that can't be bought track-by-track,
albums where twenty sub-minute tracks are still $0.99 each, and
tracks priced higher than $0.99. The most expensive album I've seen
was B.B. King's "Anthology" at $19.98, which has over 2.5 hours of
music on it.

Combine that with the massive amount of data being collected on
browsing and purchasing habits, all tied to individual users, and
I figure that in about a month, the labels will be wetting themselves
with joy over their ability to tweak pricing on a daily basis and get
real feedback on what motivates consumers. I suspect that we'll
start to see Virtual Greatest Hits collections that offer the same
discount pricing as "real" albums; the label can assemble a playlist
in a few seconds, upload a previously unused photograph as a "cover",
and *boom*. They don't even have to write liner notes.

That will also be the point when Apple starts to get a secondary
revenue stream, as the labels jockey for position on the home page.
If that means they have to supply exclusive tracks that people want,
I won't complain. The cool thing is that if they start trying to
create artificial "exclusives" that turn out to be crap, the market
will reject them with record speed.

• The ability to see at a glance, inline in the iTunes interface, which tracks you've already bought-- so you don't accidentally buy them again, like (for instance) if you buy one track from an album, and then decide you want to buy the whole thing;
• The ability to recover (re-download) all the music you're "entitled to", if your hard drive crashes; right now they have a Knowledge Base article discussing how to back-up your music to CD/DVD, but that's not very satisfying;
• The ability to "Check For Purchased Music" and download all the music you've bought onto all three machines you've authorized, rather than having to download it once and then copy it from one machine to another.

Something I couldn't resist: one of my first purchases was the
theme song from Napster: Bow Wow Wow's "C30 C60 C90 Go". :-)