Rochester Writers

Although I’ve been using Macs for years at my job, I’ve finally just made the switch at home, replacing a 6+ year old clunker PC with an equally-old but infinitely-better-running G4 tower. All “My OS can beat up your OS” arguments aside, the only thing I really miss from ye olde PC world is the non-monopolized MP3 player/ripper market. In that department, I was a huge fan of Media Monkey and I’ve found myself missing a lot of its features now that I’m begrudgingly using iTunes.

There is, however, one feature of iTunes that I do like, and that’s the mini-store. Not so much the “Buy More Crap!” aspect of it, but rather the little pane that gives me the Recommendations/Other Listeners Bought... List based upon what I'm listening to. Now that I don't play in a band/work in a record store/have human contact outside of work anymore, various facets of the internet such as MP3 Blogs, Last.fm and now the iTunes recommendations feature are allowing me to remain "in the know," as it were, or at least moreso than the other old dudes on my block.

But over the past few days, I've noticed something kind of funny with my recommendations list... it's one of those things that didn't really register at first...

The second time the oddball recommendation popped up, I definitely noticed it, but thought it was just a fluke...

But then it happened again...

And again...

And so on...

...and so on...

So what's the deal? It's been pretty well documented that various online vendors have had their recommendations features hijacked and commandeered for purposes funny or otherwise. But, unless iTunes is lying to me, other people (presumably with listening tastes similar to my own) are snapping up Dr. Laura's audiobooks at a substantial rate. But I don't buy it (pun not intended). At the risk of stereotyping, Rocket from the Crypt fans are just not the type of people who subscribe to the typical Dr. Laura doctrine.

And although it's not too much of a stretch to imagine Apple selling advertising real estate on their iTunes interface, it strikes me as odd that if this is indeed true, that Dr. Laura's camp would be actively pursuing listeners of quasi-obscure indie rock. Apparently folks who like the barely-known-outside-of-Chicago Del Rey are the kind of people who need the guidance of Dr. Laura. It reminds me of the time that some still-anonymous person who was obviously concerned about my spiritual well-being sent me an unmarked package containing 30 or so Chick tracts in the mail.