Forget the Beatles, Where’s Garth?

 
As many of you may remember, last November The Beatles announced their music would be available for download on iTunes. Hooray, right? No!
Forget The Beatles! Where’s Garth? As many of my fellow co-workers know, I am an avid Garth Brooks fan. A few months ago I decided to upgrade my worn out “Double Live,” “No Fences” and “Fresh Horses” compact discs for electronic versions. I need to have Garth with me at all times. I needed a more versatile format.
That’s when the tragedy happened. While searching on iTunes for my favorite artist, I realized that Garth Brooks is not available on iTunes.  Say what!? Yes, yes, I know it’s hard to fathom, but it’s true! The only thing that appeared in the search results were karaoke versions and covers of his most popular songs.
How could this happen? After devoting some time to Google to figure out this absurdity I came to an answer. Garth, along with a few other artists, believe iTunes should offer more variable pricing and allow album-only downloads. At the moment, iTunes makes artists sell their albums via two ways: 1.) through individual track purchases or
2) buying the entire album at one set price.
Garth doesn’t want his albums to be broken down into individual tracks for purchase.
Apparently, Garth isn’t the only artist holding out on iTunes for this reason. In 2007, Jay-Z took his album, “American Gangster” off of the popular music-downloading site because the site refused to make it an album-only purchase.  Jay Z said “As movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles.”
I get it, I really do! But what do I do when my CD’s have too many scratches on them that I can’t replay “Friends in Low Places” 100 times on my way to work? Or what if I want to listen to them on my iPod? I guess for now I’ll be stuck buying the CD’s again at my local music shop.
Other artists that have not jumped on the iTunes bandwagon:
AC/DC
Def Leppard
Black Sabbath
Bob Seger