February 9, 2004 Downloaders Can Get Nothing for Something From Apple By DAVID F. GALLAGHER
he top-of-the-line iPod music player from Apple Computer can hold four solid weeks of music. But what if you just want a little peace and quiet? As it turns out, Apple sells that too - sounds of silence for 99 cents. Steve Halberstadt of Raleigh, N.C., made such a purchase last week after discovering that Apple's iTunes store, the Web's leading downloadable music outlet, had added "The Whitey Album," a 1995 release by Ciccone Youth, a jokey side project of the rock band Sonic Youth. The album's second track album, "Silence," consists of 63 seconds of exactly that. (The band has said, with tongue in cheek, that the track is a version of John Cage's famous silent composition "4'33"," only speeded up.) After checking out the 30-second preview, which "seemed to be very representative of the rest of the song," Mr. Halberstadt said he could not help but make the purchase. He described it as "the best 99 cents I've ever spent'' in an e-mail message last week to Jack Miller, the editor in chief of the news and gossip Web site As the Apple Turns (www.appleturns.com). Mr. Miller mentioned the silent track on his site, and soon readers were submitting others they had dug up among the more than 500,000 selections in the iTunes store. Most of the tracks were clearly meant to be breathers between songs, not silence for silence's sake, but in the automated process of chopping albums into files they had been given their own price tags. Several were from an album by the hip-hop group Slum Village, and like all of the album's tracks, they bore an "explicit" label indicating profanity - or in these cases, explicit silence. Using the readers' suggestions, Mr. Miller compiled a playlist of "nine tracks of professionally encoded silence, a total of 6 minutes and 44 seconds of the yawning void," downloadable from iTunes for just $8.91. He noted that as with all iTunes purchases, antipiracy measures allow the silence to be enjoyed on no more than three computers. Late in the week, Apple made it impossible to buy the Ciccone Youth silent track by itself. An Apple spokeswoman, Natalie Sequeira, said such decisions were up to the artists, and "in this case they recently told us that they wanted it to be available only as part of the album." DAVID F. GALLAGHER Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top -- Mrs Nathalie Collins Box A176, Australind WA 6233 AUSTRALIA Tel & Fax: (+61) 8 9796 0509 Mobile: (+61) 43 989 1998 --
