Yet More iTunes Inadequacies

It drives me mad when I actually want to buy a song on iTunes or Amazon or wherever but the sites only offer the whole album for sale, which offers 12 tracks (almost half of which are score tracks) for £7.99. Although I often like movie scores in the context of the film there are very few to which I actually listen independently (exceptions being Last of the Mohicans, Gettysburg, The Beach and Cruel Intentions and the first three of those are for mainly sentimental reasons) and I object that £3.33 of the price of the album is spent on tracks I don't really care about and don't want to buy.

I most recently encountered this with the soundtrack of the movie Adam, which I saw earlier in the week. Adam's twist on the hackneyed New York love story is that the eponymous protagonist has Asperger's syndrome and thus his relationship with his upstairs neighbour Beth doesn't proceed as planned (not least because her dad is Sandy Cohen--except far from being super-dad, he ends up letting his family down in a big way). I enjoyed the film even though it was sappy (somehow, hackneyed romantic comedies set in Manhattan always win me over no matter how sappy or cliched they are) and the leads were good, particularly Hugh Dancy (not bad for someone from the Potteries (via Winchester College and Oxford).

Anyway, the soundtrack was also pretty sappy but I was very taken with one of the songs--When You Find Me by Josh Radin featuring Maria Taylor--which was used during a particularly sappy scene involving Adam hurrying to Grand Central and out to commuterland as snow falls for the sky and Beth sits by herself all tearful. I quite liked some of the other non-score songs on the soundtrack too but not enough to buy the whole album so I was glad to finally find a copy of the song online. I completely agree with Wears the Trousers Magazine's assessment of the track as, "heavy on the sap but just about bypasses cheesiness with some dramatic (if hardly unconventional) cello work and sweetly clunky piano."

I've now listened to the damn thing about ten times in the space of an hour so it's obviously destined either for my top 25 most played songs playlist or for that subset of songs in my iTunes library that I loved so much until I overdosed.

Of course, given the number of people that seem to be trying to track down a copy of the song online (compared to, say, all of the other tracks on the soundtrack), it is very sneaky of Amazon and iTunes (or whoever makes up these rules) to only allow people to buy the song as part of the whole album, presumably in an attempt to sell more copies of the album. It's not as though I'm walking into HMV and asking them to slice a CD into 12 parts and sell me one part. There is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to pay my 79p to buy the only song I like, thus bah!