Cue the Slow, Sarcastic Applause.

All right, how's this for irony? I had a hankering for some new music to listen to at work tomorrow. And there's several new (well, new to me) bands whose stuff I really wanted to pick up more of, having been given a random track or two by various people. (Yes, given! For free! Over the internet! Gasp!) However, I've reluctantly come to the decision that I simply can't buy from iTunes, because stuff you get from them won't run on any player but an iPod, and I both object to that in principle and realize that it could seriously screw me a few years down the road. But tracks from Napster come with this DRM stuff that makes it impossible to get them onto the iPod without jumping through all kinds of annoying hoops that I really just don't feel up to bothering with right now. So in the end I said "screw it" and bought nothing.

Congratulations, music industry! Good job protecting your sales figures from evil music pirates! Congratulations Apple! Good job protecting that monopoly!

What's especially amusing is that, hey, I probably would have bought the albums the downloaded tracks were from.