… but just like a lot of other people, I’ve recently fallen in love with my iPod, and I love Apple’s iTunes store. It’s reintroduced me to the world of music. I’m finding artists and songs I never would have found otherwise. Now, if I read an article about an artist or band that sounds interesting, or overhear part of a song I like (usually in a bar or on television, since I don’t listen to the radio), it’s easy to stop by iTunes and download it. At 99 cents a pop, the worst that can happen is I don’t like the song as much as I thought I would and I’m out a buck.

Right now, iTunes gives you the option of buying individual songs, or in most cases, the entire album for $9.99. So, if you buy one song, and decide you’d like to purchase the whole album, you either have to then go download each individual song, or buy the album and get a duplicate copy of the original song. In many cases, it’s cheaper to deal with the duplicate than to download all of the songs individually.

Based entirely on an article I read a couple days ago, I just downloaded Spoon’s "I Turn My Camera On" and decided I liked it enough to want the entire album. So, I was just wondering, why don’t they give you the option of upgrading to the album after you purchase one or two songs? I would have been even more motivated to purchase the whole album if I’d gotten a notice from Apple saying, "Do you like that song? You’ll like the other songs, too….click here to upgrade and download the rest of the album." Or something like that.

Artists, Apple, and the record labels would all benefit. I’m sure the sales resulting from campaigns like that would more than offset the small gains they might make from people choosing to download twelve individual songs.

iTunes is a beautiful, simple, masterful tool, but they might want to take a few lessons from Amazon in e-marketing … although, now that I think about it, Apple has always been better at design than marketing.

Now, back to the topic at hand….

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