More info: The SCC album is $11.99 on iTMS for all 16 tracks, so that's not bad, but it's not $9.99. In fact, all SCC albums are $11.99. That's $2 cheaper than Amazon. Oops!

Aimee Mann's I'm With Stupid is $9.99 for 13 tracks.

Jagged Little Pill is $9.99 for 13 tracks.

Alice in Chains' self-titled album is $9.99 for 12 tracks, while their Unplugged is $9.99 for 13 tracks.

Previn's Symphony No. 9 is $8.91 for 9 tracks. Is Amazon really charging $1.89 per track? Oops, guess nobody will buy that one from Amazon now!

Here is where things get odd. Only 15 of the 17 tracks of Adam Sandler's Stan and Judy's Kid album are available from iTMS. Track 7 and 16 are missing. As a result, you must buy the album a track at a time, so that's $14.85 for the 15 tracks, making Amazon a better deal, especially if you want the whole thing. The missing tracks are Whitey and Psychotic Legend of Uncle Donnie - Allen Covert. Both are described in the Amazon review as very long (16 minutes in the case of Whitey), but also very good.

What The Hell Happened To Me suffers a similar fate, missing three out of twenty tracks. The price of $16.83 for the remaining 17 does not compare favorably to Amazon at all, especially when you miss out on The Goat, The Hypnotist and Do It For Mama. I used to own this disc, and I can assure you that you would be missing something indeed.

So as far as Adam Sandler goes, you pay more to get less with the iTMS. The iTMS is really only a good idea if all you want is the many different renditions of The Chanukah Song and nothing else. If they had the bleeped version of Ode To My Car, I'd get that for $.99 too. It's much funnier than the unbleeped version.

Bill Cosby is a much better deal. Himself is only $6.93 for the seven tracks. Yes, Amazon really is chargin $1.57 per track. The Millenium Collection is $9.99 for 12 tracks.

So iTMS beats Amazon on cost (assuming you aren't a physical-media devotee), but only when the entire album is available. And every artist besides Steven Curtis Chapman is at the "lesser of $9.99/album or $.99/song" price-point.

Since I live in Canukistan, I don't have any access to iTunes store (though I've been a Mac loyalist since 86) I can't try the store. I've been using emusic, though they have taken the "well, it's good enough" approach.

My conclusion? The major record companies are so dedicated to making sure that any new way of doing business sucks, that any new way of doing business in the music biz will suck.

I still don't understand why $10 for a bunch of mp3s is a good deal. For a couple bucks more you can order it online at someplace like Cheap-CDs and have the real thing (and sometimes their prices are *lower* than $9.99.) Paying for mp3s just encourages labels to abandon albums, making singles the future of music. Do we really want the music of the future to be narrowed down to only singles from artists?!

Thanks for all the work on the stats, Phillip.

I keep buying albums at iTMS. Probably 95% or more of the tracks I have I bought as part of albums.

What's frustrating is that I keep going to the iTMS to buy an album and it isn't there. Just in the past few days: No Radiohead--at all. No Electric Six/Wildbunch. Tony Pierce keeps raving about Tsar, so I thought I'd try to hear their music. Their album was released on Hollywood Records, but it's not there.

I've been disappointed many more times than I have found what I'm looking for.

Makes me wish there were a compulsory license for all recorded music. Apple wouldn't have to hire lawyers to track down copyright owners and negotiate individual deals--which probably represents years of human-hours and millions of dollars. Apple could just carry every single recording it could get its hands on, and the artists and copyright holders would still get paid fairly.

Oh yeah, and no White Stripes either. What's up with that?

The sad part is that I've seen artists on there that later disappeared, so it definitely isn't any thing technical. It's not even "Oh, we just haven't gotten around to that yet."

Freaking lawyers. Grr...

BTW, Apple doesn't have anything to do with artists and copyright holders. They just pay the label the set amount (rumor is $.65 per track and presumably 65% of album costs as well) once a month. That's it. The labels can continue screwing the artists all they want. :(

Hey Brian, Tony burned the Tsar CD for us when we met him last summer - it kicks. Great work on all this Phillip, keep it up!

Phillip: it must just be a quirk of the CDs you've selected, because it is very rare that I've found a better deal, after shipping and handling is added, than what Cheap-CDs.com offers. Of course, this isn't really what we were talking about, but I thought I'd point it out.

I still have a problem paying nearly full price - this is the important issue - for compressed, lossy files. When iTunes and their eventual counterparts get their act together and offer LOSSLESS files together with 300dpi artwork, then I will see justification for buying downloadable music. Lossy compression-based music should be available at a significant savings - you are, afterall, buying an inferior product. The idea that the future of music is not better, clearer, more revealing is frightening - all the work people have done to get music to a state where it is nearly live sounding (in reference to 96k audio that has been touted as the be-all, end-all of audiophile formats) will have been a complete and utter waste. All these amazing recordings, so warm and realistic that you can feel the very room it was recorded in (and this is just regular CD audio I'm talking about) and we're going to destroy that ambience so we can carry it around in our pocket? I won't be a part of it. If it's the future, I want to be able to say that it's not my fault - that I was at least one person who stood up and demanded that quality come first. It may not be cool and popular to think like this, but once we head down this road it's permanent. Once the record companies have confirmation that people are responding to this, they will slowly begin to disassemble the meaning of "long player." I know that it doesn't seem possible, but I can guarantee you it is going to happen - if record companies know they can get a big single out of someone, rather than produce an album, that's exactly what they're going to do. All the flawed beauty that makes up an album will disappear - because the only thing people will want to do is create singles. Without the bounds of a CD, tape, record, whatever, listeners will simply throw this song together with that song, and eventually the whole idea of a an album will exist only for a few people out there who remember the "old days." The thought there may be a time I recall as "the old days, when we had albums" makes me tremendously sad.

Here's a "quirk": the Billboard Top 100 list on Cheap-CDs.com only has ten albums under $10, and the first comes in at #44. The VH1 list fares better, with 33 out of 100.

So the discs aren't so cheap, the pricing is difficult enough to keep track of in your head that people think that they're cheap, one might almost come to the conclusion that they deliberately keep the $1.43 per CD charge separate to invite comparisons (which seems dishonest), and 20% of the first ten discs I tried to look up weren't even listed.

I think I'll stick with Amazon, thanks.

Radiohead and other bands are resisting the song by song download model saying it damages the artistic integrity of their 'albums' It also happens to hurt their revenue stream.

It's not Apple's fault many of these bands are missing.

It seems the artists forget the more the resist the more they encourage illegal song by song download.

This is how the world is now I think they need to realise it as you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Though most people would prefer to buy music when given the opportunity and the right price model.