Saturday, April 15, 2006

Gift Tunes Meme

This meme has the MacAllister seal of approval


Thank you Macallister and Jenna and thank you Medievalist for coming up with the meme!

WARNING: You may find yourself downloading way too many songs/albums for yourself - I fear I have compulsive iTunes downloading syndrome. And several new albums on my iPod.

Here's the meme:

1. Pick one or more of your friends who listens to digital music; preferably someone who already has iTunes and an iTunes account, and who has a blog or Live Journal or something similar.

Songs are .99 cents on iTunes; if people want to send MP3s directly, that's up to them, but post the song title, artist, and album anyway. You can use a credit card or PayPal to purchase songs. You must have installed a copy of iTunes to play or download the songs. I suspect it's possible give music with other music services, but I don't know. There are also lots of good sources for free music on the net; feel free to use those, or to publicize indie artists you like a lot. There are free songs at Amazon too.

2. Select the song you want to give.

3. Post this meme on your blog or Live Journal, and list your friends, the song you've chosen for them, (keep the song a secret until after you friend receives it, if you'd like), a link to their blog, and these instructions. Feel free to add a comment about why you chose the song.

4. Purchase the single song for each friend, one at a time, (that is don't buy three songs for three friends.) If you use the iTunes store, find the song, then click on the link for the album; you will see a link near the top of the screen that says "Gift This Music; click it, then click the Gift button that's included in the link for the song. When you check out, you'll see a form with spaces for your name, your friend's name and email address, and a short message. This will be emailed to your friend, with instructions about how to download their gift song. Use the message to send them a link to the permalink for your blog post about the meme so they'll know to blog about the song. If you use Tags, tag the post as "Gift Music."

5. If you decide to "gift back" to someone who tags you, please also tag someone else, so we can have a variety of musical tastes, journals, blogs, and people.

Troubleshooting: Get iTunes for Mac or Windows here. It's free. If you can't get the URL/Web link from the email the iTunes store sends to tell you you have a song to download, try copying the URL to a new document, making sure that there are no spaces or returns where the very long URL has broken. You can covert the songs in iTunes from Apples DRM/protecte AAC format to an mp3 if you'd like.

That's it!

Now, I had no luck trying to download from Firefox. I had to copy the link from the email by right clicking on the "download" button in the email and selecting "copy link location" then I pasted the link into IE and all went well after that.

I'm tagging the following poor souls:


Frank
who has received "A Kiss To Many" by Eddy Arnold, from the soundtrack to The Notorious Bettie Page

Anne who is getting "I Wanna Be On Star Trek" by Jimmy and the Parrots, from their Better than New album. Anne, if you're on dial-up and none of this downloads for you, I'll burn you a CD version.

Unique who is getting "You Raise Me Up" from the album Celtic Woman. Same deal for you as Anne, Unique.

, , , , , , ,,
, , , , ,

6 comments:

ohdawno said...

Hi again! At 99cents a song I'd love to give away lots and lots of these! I don't have email addies of many of my AW friends - so if you're one of 'em send me an email! Just look on the sidebar, I've posted a link.

I'm having a lot of fun with this!

T. M. Hunter said...

Just realize that the person you're sending it to has to have the latest version of iTunes to download the gift, which only runs on XP or Win2000.

uniquematerial said...

Thanks, Dawno! Cool song.

I'll participate as soon as I can get PayPal/iTunes to cooperate.

Frank Baron said...

Dawno, I'm touched and grateful at your thoughtfulness. :)

(She's waiting for the "but"....)

But - I had ITunes on my machine but I uninstalled it. I didn't like it. It kept insisting it was my player of preference. It wasn't. I tried explaining to it that I really, really preferred Winamp.

It didn't listen to me and whenever I clicked on something that required a listening thingy, ITunes would brashly pop up. I finally got mad and...well, I already said what I did.

Thanks though. It really is the thought that counts. :)

ohdawno said...

Aston, thanks for the heads up.
Unique - glad you like it!
Frank - no worries, it's a fun song tho'. I have the opposite problem - all my tunes want to open on the Windows player when I want them to open on iTunes. I think it's your settings.

Anne C. Watkins said...

Oh, how sweet of you! I really, really want to hear that song--it sounds exactly like something I'd love. :)

Can I take you up on the CD thing? My dial-up is like molasses, but molasses is probably faster. heh

Thanks so much, Dawno. This is cool. :)