With Apple’s iTunes Store just two months shy of reaching its fifth birthday, much of the talk still centers around what music isn’t available for legal download. The Beatles are still missing, which has garnered headlines both because of their “biggest band ever” status and because of the drama surrounding the Apple v. Apple lawsuit. Led Zeppelin, another long-defunct band whose music still manages to appeal to teenage fans with each passing generation, is missing as well, and no seems entirely sure why. Add AC/DC and Garth Brooks to the mix and one might wonder if the iTunes Store isn’t heading into its fifth year with more prominent holes in its lineup than Swiss cheese.
But during last week’s 49th Grammy Awards I noticed a different trend altogether. Out of curiosity, each time a list of nominees was read off, I paused the show and punched each of them into the iTunes Store in order to see what was available for download and what wasn’t. Sure, it took me about eight hours to watch the awards this year, but the data I found was enlightening: almost every televised nominee was right there in iTunes, waiting for me to download it.
Of course Apple went and made all my hard work completely irrelevant by posting a single page in the iTunes Store with links to every Grammy nominee, or at least to every nominee in each of the twenty-five major categories Apple felt compelled to highlight.
The verdict? Every single one of the twenty-five winners is available for download, at least in the U.S. Store. I wondered if Apple might have sought fit to bury any categories in which the winner wasn’t available, so I compared their list with my notes. I might have missed something, but I can’t see any major categories omitted. And looking at the larger picture, of the one hundred and twenty-five nominees (okay, a little less than that as the Dixie Chicks managed to get nominated in just about every category but Best Rap Album), only a grand total of five nominees are missing.
If you do the math, it turns out that more than ninety-five percent of the nation’s most popular (or at least most award-worthy) music released in the past year is currently available for sale in the iTunes Store. Not too shabby, eh? And it’s not just the young-uns either. A quick glance at the list of nominees reveals industry veterans ranging from Elvis Costello to Lionel Richie, as well as artists such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers who took several years to decide that their music belonged in iTunes.
Who are the five absentee nominees? The latest album from the artist currently known as Prince accounts for two of them, which is odd seeing how much of Prince’s back-catalog is available. Then again his relationship with his label has been so tumultuous that he once changed his name just to get out of his contract, so who knows what’s going on there. Paul McCartney’s latest solo offering is missing for obvious reasons, something that should be rectified soon thanks to the resolution of the Apple v. Apple battle. Sheryl Crow’s “missing” song is actually available on an album-only collection of Grammy nominees (as is McCartney’s song, for that matter), and her entire back-catalog is there. Finally, George Carlin’s nomination in the comedy category is missing from iTunes, but again most or all of his back-catalog is available.
So out of all 125 nominees in the twenty-five biggest Grammy categories, only two of them (Prince and Carlin) are missing from the iTunes Store. Although a hundred percent participation would be nice, this is probably about as close to a full house as one might reasonably expect. In a retail CD store I think you’d expect more than two percent of all albums to be out of stock at any given time anyway, meaning that you probably have a better chance of finding what you’re looking for in iTunes than at a record shop – and that’s not even considering the less prominent stuff that you’re unlikely to find in a retail store.
It used to be that the iTunes Store was defined by who was missing. But as its fifth birthday approaches, the big iTunes story these days is the fact that it’s nearing perfect attendance, at least among prominent U.S. musicians who are still creating new music. The missing artists are still notable for their conspicuousness if nothing else, but these days the absentees are starting to feel less like a real concern and more like a footnote.
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