It’s been interesting watching Kiwi’s get all excited about the arrival of iTunes. Much like I was when it first arrived. Today though. it’s a different story. iTunes still does the syncing and I love using it to get at all those podcasts. But that’s it. Seems I’m not the only one as iTunes remain flat in the US market:

“IPods are not sitting around generating dozens and dozens of transactions every quarter,” said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst for Forrester Research. “People buy a certain number of songs, and then they stop.”

I’m also one of the few people that watch video on their iPod – the downloading is just painful but on planes or treadmills, nothing beats watching TED speeches or Blade…

Why? Maybe they get frustrated with the DRM as I did. OK, buying songs one at a time seems cool until you realize how many you’ve bought and how unportable, limited in use and incompatible (e.g. with Sonos) they are.

Then you get a Sonos with Raphsody at home and it’s pretty much game over inside the house as I simply pay a small monthly fee for all the music we can eat. Just love it. I use Raphsody for sampling and then buy CDs on Amazon.

iTunes has become a terrific music storage and management platform for me. But its no longer a place I shop.