| Wednesday, October 26, 2005 |
18:49 - Let's see brick-and-mortar do this
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iTunes Music Store users, don't just search for the songs you know you want off the top of your head. That'd be like walking straight past the special displays in the entrance of the bookstore on the way to the dimly lit back sections. And whereas in a real bookstore you might be forgiven for assuming the display tables will only have mainstream junk you don't want, don't forget: this is iTunes. They're just now tapping the flexibility potential of this new medium.
It looks, for example, like they're spending a great deal of their time on the "iTunes Essentials" feature, which is great and engrossing fun. They've gathered together songs into hundreds of different 75-song collections, each one divided into "The Basics", "Next Steps", and "Deep Cuts" segments, and each of those pages with a text intro that someone with a great sense of humor had to write, as well as a lot of familiarity with the material in question. And they keep adding more. Above and beyond a whole bunch of genre- and artist-specific pre-culled collections, There's Halloween music, car songs, gay pride songs, New York songs, workout music, cowboy songs, and a really great one called Guilty Pleasures (I find myself wanting to hit the "Buy All" link on that one—oops, I guess I'm not supposed to admit that). There's even one called More Cowbell!—the store doesn't mind working up a whole presentation around a sly SNL/Christopher Walken injoke now and then. It's just another relation in the database, after all, another square piece of promo art, and about 2K of expository text. Add as many of these as you want! You get to do that sort of thing if you're just a database.
Whoever it is writing the text does seem a bit more enthused about the America: Protest collection than the America: Pride one, but hey, these things happen. The interface is just addictive—I could read through these all day, even if I never bought anything from them. I've certainly learned more about music doing this than spending any college weekend afternoon flipping through the shelves at Tower Records.
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Brian Tiemann
