I’m writing this on the subway on the way home, listening to Elvis Costello sing Burt Bacarach in the album Painted From Memory. For the past few days I’ve been craving to hear it, but I wasn’t quite motivated enough to search the local record stores for the possibility they’d have a five year old disc, and then pay $18 for it, considering I’ve already got a copy nestled away in storage.

Coincendentally, though, today was the day Apple unveiled it’s new music service. In a nutshell they offer downloads of songs at $0.99 a song or $9.99 a disc if there are more than 10 tracks. There are some restrictions, but not as many as in other online services. And it’s elegant and convenient. Eager to test it, I popped open iTunes, did a search for our Elvis, and a few moments later had everything happily transfering to my local computer, and soon Mr. Costello was crooning on my iPod Nice.

Apple has the one killer feature that other avenues have, for me, lacked; convenience. It’s surely possible to get music online for free, but it’s a game of cat and mouse, and if you’re looking for something odd, it can be very time consuming. It’s surely possible for me to order the disc, but it’s quite costly, and considering these days all I do is rip and encode the songs to hard drive and file the media away, a bit of a waste. This service is a good compromise, as I’m not at all disinclined to pay a reasonable amount.

There are some problems, to be sure. The main one being that selection is presently limited. I’d love to be able to pull up the complete works of Perotin or Buxtehüde as easily as I could those of U2, and such a service could be a boon to independent artists and labels; it would practically eliminate distribution costs. I’d like to know how much artists are getting from this scheme, and I’m not convinced that the rights management is going to be as seamless and unobstrusive as they claim. But, all in all, it’s a step in the right direction.

I can only dream that in a few years, when I wake up with a craving to hear an obscure work by Machaut, I can go online and be in motet heaven within minutes, a dollar poorer.