I hadn’t blogged this because I didn’t know what to say, not because I didn’t think it was important, or that she’s not worth remembering.

Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead.

TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people.

GrandTimes.com – 1996 interview with Rosa Parks.

Wikipedia entry – if you don’t know anything about Rosa Parks, I quote from this wiki entry (which may lead you to read more, or remind you of the situation, but didn’t know who had done it.

Rosa Louise Parks (February 4, 1913–October 24, 2005) was an African American seamstress and figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, most famous for her refusal in 1955 to give up a bus seat to a white man who demanded her seat.

This seems to be what I’ve been missing out with my posts about Australian iTunes Music Store.

The openning catalogue exceeds 1 million tracks, it appears Sony BMG are still holding out. Songs are priced at $1.69 per track and $3.39 per video, with most albums going for $16.99.

First off, there’s also Singles of the Week, a free single download each week. This week it’s Shadowland by Youth Group. I just downloaded it. Great song, and I was also interested to see the sound quality you get. I know, to international readers this may be old hat, but for us in Australia, this is all spanky new. Allow me the indulgence.

So the sound quality, which I assume goes for all music coming down the pipeline from iTunes, is a bit rate of 128kbps, sample rate 44.1 kHz, making it 3.8mb for a 3min 35sec song.

Some price comparisons:

Sarah Blasko’s album Overture and the Underscore , with 11 songs, sells for $19.99 on CD.
iTunes Music Store (iTMS) Australia? $11.99

Ben Lee’s album Awake Is the New Sleep, with 14 songs, sells for $24.99 on CD.
iTMS Australia? The $16.99 standard for an album.

Missy Higgins’ album Sound of White, with 13 songs, sells for $19.99 on CD
iTMS Australia? $21.97
Why the difference? Because iTMS Australia doesn’t let you buy the whole album, instead having to purchase individual songs for $1.69 each. This is a drawback. Why would you pay more?

Not doing so well at staying away from the blogging today…

Press Release from Apple
Apple Launches iTunes Music Store in Australia

iTunes – do you use it? It’s the music player program for your PC (or Mac, for those of us who have converted) that allows inbuilt purchasing for music online. With the release of iTunes4.9 on June 28, the ability to directly download podcasts through the iTunes Music Store was made available. The most recent releases have added video to that capability.

To get a podcast online you don’t have to have it in the iTunes podcast directory, but it certainly gives it more publicity. The problem was that unless you had a credit card linked to an iTunes Music Store country’s bank (eg in the US, UK, France) you couldn’t make an iTunes account, hence couldn’t purchase music from iTunes or submit a podcast to their directory.

Well, the big news is that today, we officially have iTunes Music Store Australia. That’s right, as of today you, the average Australian, can more easily purchase music online. Also, Ashgrove would be able to submit a podcast of our sermons to the iTunes directory, if we were ready to. There is an official announcement sometime today, but the store itself is already open. Naturally I already have an account, otherwise I wouldn’t be so hyper about it.

So that’s my big long post. As an aside, check this out. I’ve been keeping an unofficial track of the number of podcasts available in different categories in iTunes. Some categories had subcategories, like Religion and Spirituality had seven subs, one of which was Christianity. Sometime in the last two weeks iTunes removed any subcategory distinctions, so now you can’t specifically tell which were tagged Christian as opposed to New Age or Philosophy.

But until they removed those subcategories, what was the largest single categorisation of podcasts available worldwide through the iTunes Music Store? That’s right, Christian ones. On October 10th there were 1,045 different Christian podcasts available, beating out the generic Audio Blogging category by only 44 available podcasts (991).

Today, the Religion and Spirituality category sits on an even 1500 podcasts out of 14,719 available. While this is only those podcasts available in iTunes, I think 15,000 podcasts (which it will hit in the next week) is a fairly good sample to base an emerging trend on.

How’s all that for your useless bits of information for the day? Glad I could oblige.

Anyone who has iTunes installed, check it out. iTunes Music store comes to Australia!