Revolutionary. Short Tower, go long on Apple and Amazon (who surely will implement this soon themselves). I installed iTunes 4, stuck in my .mac username (and after figuring out that I had to use username@mac.com instead of just username), and presto. $0.99 per track if you don’t want the whole album, or $10 for a whole album which is $15-20 at Tower or Amazon to get the physical media. I bought and downloaded The Eminem Show for $10 in less time than it took to subsequently burn it onto a CD-R to listen to in my car on the way home.

Songs are shipped as DRM-controlled AAC, but the DRM is quite lax enough for it all to make sense. I can do everything I reasonably might want to with the media once I’ve downloaded it, and it just sits alongside the rest of my digital music in iTunes. There are one or two restrictions that the AAC files have (can only install on 3 machines at a time, you have to alter a playlist if you want to burn it to CD more than 10 times) but really those are not situations you’ll often encounter, and you can always work around them if you’re really determined (you can burn a CD, then rip it back to MP3 for example). All in all, this is exactly what one needs from electronic music delivery. Not per-month fees, no ridiculous catalog limitations (200,000 track available from all the major labels — and I’m guessing anyone who might want to sign up would be able to). The record labels must be happy too — even at 1/2 the price they charge for an album on physical media, they likely get higher margins with this delivery mechanism, because their distribution costs are close to nil (apart from the presumable cut Apple is taking).

As Jeremy points out in his blog, there’s a bunch of stuff which could be done to extend this with Amazon-like recommendations (and I’m Amazon will be all over that when they roll out their version of this). But the big leap has been lept — convincing the record companies that electronic distribution of their products can and will work, and that it can be done in a way which is beneficial to both consumers and the labels/artists.