The Last American Bachelor

Apple's new iTunes LP format

Yesterday, Apple released iTunes Version 9 with some exciting new features, only one of which am I going to talk about today, and that’s the new iTunes LP format. (Coincidence that this was released the same day as the highly anticipated Beatles Rock Band release? Maybe. Maybe not.)

I’ve long been a fan of digital music. I began stealing, I mean shoplifting, I mean purchasing CDs nearly a full year before I ever owned a CD player. Why? Because I knew, even back in junior high, that digital music meant I would never have to again purchase replacements for my cassettes and vinyl records that wore out due to abusive overplaying. It was bad enough that my favorite album at the time was Wilson Phillips, but must I also endure the shame of having to repeatedly humiliate myself to Dick and Barry as I purchase a new copy each week? I digress…

Soon enough this digital media was being ‘ripped’ onto people’s computers, for digital archiving purposes, you can be sure. And in an effort to save expensive storage space on these computers, the MP3 audio file format came to be the de facto standard in online music file formats. Since then, audio file compression has become amazing, so that songs can be recorded with nearly perfect reproductive quality, using a relatively small amount of storage space. And with things like the iPod, we can now carry our entire music catalogue on a media player the size of a postage stamp.

Yes, this is all fantastic news, but this all came with one major sacrifice. No, not the RIAA’s greedy revenue stream – fuck them. No, what I was missing was all of the other art that came with records and albums and CDs. The cover art, the liner notes, the lyrics. Would we never have another Sgt. Pepper album cover again?

So with Apple’s latest release of the iTunes media player/online store, they have brought us what they’re calling the iTunes LP. Finally. We can now purchase complete albums of the digital music we love. Don’t think of these iTunes LPs as just a bundle of MP3s along with some pretty graphics and maybe some lyrics and liner notes. Apple would not attempt to amaze us with something so trivial. No, think of the new iTunes LP format as something more akin to the DVD version of your favorite movies. These digital LPs can come with any kind of media you can imagine, backstage footage, interviews, music videos, art, publicity images, and interactive menus just like a DVD.

I was planning on packaging my future albums as DVDs, in order to give my fans a reason to purchase something more than digital song file downloads, but now I don’t have to worry about that any longer. I now get to indulge myself in the digital LP format, and my fans will be getting a whole lot more for their money. Do I have more surprises in mind? You bet. Keep watching.