I've never used any of the illicit services due to concerns about the quality and all of the junk that seems to show up. I tried Gnutella and Limewire but they both were a complete pain to use and I didn't have the patience to wade through the results to find what I wanted.

The iTunes Music Store, on the other hand, is an absolutely frictionless shopping experience and is completely delightful.

You can even find some bargains, too. For example, the old Firesign Theatre album "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers" for only US$1.98 since each side is a single track.

That plus "Nick Danger" (another $0.99 22 minute track), my Firesign jones is satisfied.

I've also found that there are more selections than are shown on the page. If you use the iTunes search box (or the Power Search) you'll pull up albums and artists not listed when simply browsing through the various genre main pages.

(I had to watch the Webcast to figure that one out.)

was the album my older brother used to introduce me to the FT.

Hence it's canonical status for me.

Add to that the fact that I haven't heard any Firesign Theatre for at least ten years.

They actually have some tracks from HCYBITPAOWYNAAA available and I picked them up after a quick preview, so I'm not a totally lost soul.

On an interesting note, per [link|http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/30511.html|the Reg], Apple sold *275,000* tracks during the first 18 hours of operation of the Music Store.

This may seem like peanuts compared to Kazaa or Limewire, but consider two things:
1. Kazaa and Limewire mostly consist of porn these days, not music.
2. People actually *paid* for the Apple tracks.

I think this is a good indication of pent-up demand.

I've seen this argument before and I don't know if I buy into it.

I mean, if I pay $100 (?) for a 100 Gigabyte hard drive, do I complain about how much the software I install on it costs me? Or in this case, *might* cost me?

You can put a lot more on an iPod than just music and nobody's forcing you to use up every byte of disk space. For that matter, nobody has to buy the 30 Gig iPod (though Apple hopes we all will.)

I've still got the original 5 Gig version and its just over half full. Of course, I've heard at least one person complain that they have a hard time getting iTunes to manage their 50 (!) Gigabyte music collection.

Not sure exactly what point I was trying to make here, but I appreciate you letting me vent after following all of the online commentary about this service. ( I really should know better.)