::It's hard to find a song:: [/tech/mac] (22:31)

I've been trying hard to use my pepsi/iTunes winning caps at the iTunes store. I've used a bunch, but I've still got a couple dozen left that I haven't decided how to use. It's surprisingly hard to find songs to buy.

Since the pepsi caps can't be used to buy whole albums, I'm forced to look for individual songs I want. It's rare for me to find a song I like and not want to buy the whole album. It does happen, but it's usually only for older songs that I have some sort of emotional response to. For instance, I bought "Video Killed the Radio Star". I don't really have any interest in The Buggles, but the song has some historical significance to me. "California Dreamin'" is another example. I'm not really a fan of The Mamas & The Papas, but after seeing Chungking Express, how can one not fall in long with the song? (or Wang Fei, for that matter) But these types of songs are relatively rare. Either I like a band's music or I don't. I guess I'm just not a singles kind of guy.

As an experiment, I exported my purchased song list from iTunes. So far I've bought 321 songs on 60 unique albums. That breaks down to 21 full albums accounting for 276 songs with the remaining 45 songs 39 albums. If I were using Apple press release math, I'd be claiming the iTunes single song concept a huge success, having sold twice as many singles as full albums. But in reality, it's a much smaller fraction of my whole collection. (skewed high by the fact that I've been forced to look for singles to use my pepsi caps)

I really do like the ability to buy individual songs. I'm not complaining about that in any way. But when you add it all up, I'm really not making single song purchases a part of my normal song buying experience.

As a side note, the name of this entry was inspired by the Pedro the Lion album "It's hard to find a friend", which just became available on the iTunes music store this week. I highly recommend it the whole album, but if you are looking for some singles, check out "When they really get to know you they will run", "Bad diary days" and maybe "Big Trucks".