A LOVE LETTER TO STEVE JOBS

We don’t want to weird you out or anything.

Odds are, even though you’ve been in head-to-head talks with record-biz uber-machers for a considerable length of time, you don’t know that much about us yet. You may not yet recognize the genuine affection in our “love taps.”

Really, we don’t want to make you feel awkward by saying this, but: We like you.

More to the point, we love your iTunes Music Store. And a lot of us don’t even own Macs. But after seeing your presentation and studying the fine points of your offerings, we scrambled to upgrade one of our art-room Macs to OS X, download the requisite software and steal President Todd Hensley’s credit card in order to check it out.

Having written about music and technology for a few years now, I couldn’t help having low expectations. As well-intentioned as most of the “legit” digital music services have been, most have not seemed—to put it kindly—to spend much time thinking about the consumer’s requirements. You’ve obviously given consideration to everyone in the value chain; this alone would put you in your own category.

But it would be purely academic if the Music Store weren’t so much fun.

With the indispensable assistance of Darren Cava, fellow HITS losers Jon O’Hara, Marc Pollack and I sat around the monitor throwing requests back and forth, and the process had a giddiness that spanned our whole experience of recorded music. We bobbed our heads to an Ol’ Dirty Bastard track. We blissed out to the definitive Jobim-Elis Regina version of “Aguas de Marco.” We shrieked with delight upon finding Grim Reaper’s “See You in Hell.” We marveled at the groove of “Doing It to Death” by the JB’s. I learned that I can play air guitar to way too many Steve Morse licks.

We grabbed a little Coldplay, some exclusive Missy Elliott and Massive Attack, some Morricone. Yessongs in its entirety (in President Ivana’s honor), plus M.O.T.'s $19.99(just $9.99, for a limited time only, says manager Roy "Meshugge Knight" Trakin) and ZZ Top's "Woke Up With Wood" (this one goes out to Texas Todd, for the use of the plastic). OK, we went a little overboard and spent a C-note or so. But hey, fuck Hensley.

We laughed, we sang, we threw goat...we remembered. And while remembering our vanished youth, we also remembered that every new way of distributing music gives us a chance to rediscover every recording we ever loved.

Sure, we could cavil about what’s not available: the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Metallica. Or we could gripe that some albums are featured without all of their tracks being offered. But rather than take you to task for that, we’ll simply remark that (a) what’s already available is seriously impressive and (b) the holdouts better not sleep, because this feels a lot like the future. It’s actually more fun than using KaZaA—because it was designed specifically for adventurous music-lovers—and much less frustrating.

As usual, Editor in Chief Lenny Beer got right to the point. “Well,” he asked, “do you feel better about the future of the music business than you did two days ago?”

I had to admit that I did.