So my recent barometer for the success of Apple’s iTunes Music Store has been the debut album by The Thorns, the new folk-rock supergroup made up of Matthew Sweet, Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins. It’s a little Crosby, Stills & Nash, a little The Mamas and the Papas… Close harmonies, great guitars. Great stuff.
Anyway, it came out last week. This week, it showed up in the iTunes Store, but only as a partial album, which apparently means you can’t buy the whole thing, only as 13 $.99 singles. The album itself is available at Amazon for $9.99. Added weirdness: when comparing the track listings on the iTunes store and at Amazon, they’re the same. No missing tracks. So how is this a partial album? Is there a hidden track they didn’t feel was appropriate to include? What’s going on here?
That said, there’s a lot of good music on the iTunes store that has me clutching my wallet and saying “No, no, no!” The new Joshua Redman album, Beyond, sounds super-smooth, as does the new album by Pat Metheny. There’s some old Depeche Mode on there that I always meant to pick up, and some Jackson Browne that sounds really interesting. There’s some Django Reinhardt and some Miles Davis… And there’s some great stuff in there that I can testify is truly great, like the readings by Jack Kerouac and the new album by Pete Yorn. Fellow media addicts, guard your bank accounts with your lives.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
