Legal music downloads a reality for me now.

Today I purchased and legally downloaded a track from Apple's new iTunes Music Store service. I had a LOT of trouble getting to that point, due to the immense amount of traffic the poor service is seeing. And, after managing to make the purchase, I haven't been able to make a connection to buy more music. I'm gonna try again soon.

But, all in all, the purchase went very smoothly and the quality of the AAC-encoded tune (Missy Elliot's Get Ur Freak On) is awesome. I'm going to start encoding everything I buy in AAC as it is the superior codec.

The $0.99 price per track is great. Don't be fooled, though, not all albums are $10. It's up to the labels to set the pricing, as I found out with Audioslave's album - it's a per-track price only. So, you want all 14 tracks? Great, pony up $14. But, for a lot of the albums on the service, you'll pay $10.

Apple, so far, has done a fine job of creating this service. I'm sure it'll become more reliable as the initial hype dies down. I was sad to see that Metallica (har har) and Linkin Park were nowhere to be found on the service. And, doing a search for "Voices Carry" by 'Til Tuesday turned up no results. That's why they've got the request link :-)