The country doesn’t need a president; It needs a mother
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iTMS Removing Music?Anyone else run into this? I added a ton of music to my shopping cart and waited for the day I had the money to get some of them. I went back there today only to find that a whole album is no longer available on the store. Anywhere. What the hell? I’m not talking one-time promos, either, I’m talking “Fly Like an Eagle” from the Steve Miller Band. The rest of the group is there, but that one album is gone. I’ve had this happen twice before as well. What the freak is going on here? “All government is an ugly necessity.”— A Short History of England. 63 – G. K. Chesterton |
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Yep. Posted about it a while ago I’m wondering if some artists/labels have second thoughts? The weird thing, though, was that I could still listen to the samples, just not buy the tunes anymore…
A similar thing has happened to me (about a week and a half ago). I browsed for music at work and copied the URLs to an email (usually the album URL) to send it to my home computer. When I got home, 2 of the 9 or so albums were unavailable. Since I didn’t include the album names in the email I couldn’t verify if the URL changed or the album was truly removed.
I’ve seen it happen before with damaged songs/albums. When the soundtrack to The Terminal first showed up the previews were damaged. It stayed like that for about a week, then disappeared. 2 weeks later it came back.
When the Apple Quarterly Earnings Call showed up on iTMS the other day I couldn’t download it – it claimed that the song had been moved or something like that. It then disappeared. After several hours it showed up again and this time it worked.
So maybe your album will show up again?
This has happened since the beginning. The very first week of the iTMS’s existence, I bought some Van Morrison tracks. Within the week, these tracks disappeared silently from the store and have not been added back (Domino and Moondance, for example).
The cool thing is that I own this music, and it continues to play like all the other music I’ve bought (which would not be the case with a subscription service). The poor thing is that I can’t buy more tracks, add them to iMixes, etc.
I assume this is just a mismatch between the labels and the artists. The labels decide to put out the song for purchase, but the artist decides this was a bad idea. For big enough artists (e.g. Van Morrison) the label might want to appease the artist or perhaps the artist has a special clause that allows the songs to be removed from the distribution channel.
Maybe there is another reason, but I can’t think of one that involves Apple being stupid —- Apple wants as many songs on the store as possible, and the more popular the better.