Ghosttunes? What the hell is Ghosttunes? It’s a bit like iTunes, but just for Garth Brooks, or almost… I explain, the country star has always refused to make his music digitally available, but on Thursday, he made his entire catalogue available on GhostTunes.com, a new full-service music platform, which gives the choice to consumers to listen to the music they purchase on the platform and device of their choice. You can listen to the music from a personal ‘locker’ without having to download it, or download it on a phone, tablet or computer, and so combining streaming and downloading. But once downloaded, I suppose you still need iTunes to play the songs.
Did we need another service? I don’t know, but here is the deal, you can buy Brooks’ entire catalog including the new fall 2014 album, the new double live 25th Anniversary edition DVD/2CD package, his 8 studio albums and (his newly announced) 2015 album for only $29.99. Beside the weird announcement of two Garth Brooks albums in a row (his last one was released in 2001) this ridiculous price for his entire catalog sounds either like a real bargain or a laughable cheapening of his whole career.
‘When I decided it was time to ‘go digital’ I didn’t find an existing way that really fit how I wanted to do it,’ declared Brooks to Newsok, ‘I shared my dream with some amazing minds and together have created something really special – GhostTunes.com. This is a site that treats music with the utmost respect, where our job everyday is to offer music the way the artists want to share it to the listeners who live for and love it. That’s a job I hope I can do everyday.’
Randy Bernard, CEO of GhostTunes (who is a former boss at the Indycar racing league and Professional Bull Riders according to the Guardian) had only good things to say of course: ‘Anyone familiar with the music industry knows the passion Garth has for bridging the wants and needs of artists and fans – something that the entire team has used as a guiding principle in the creation of GhostTunes.com. Today is a great day for fans of music and those that create it, and just wait until you see what we have planed next – you won’t have to wait long.’
So what is there beside Brooks? You can check by yourself, a lot of people are already on Ghosttunes, I checked the Indie section and the last releases by the Black Keys, Spoon, Coldplay, J Mascis and many others were there. It’s very similar to iTunes, even after registration but without buying anything, I was just able to stream the first few seconds of a song.
They promise a catalog of a million songs and products, and music from the biggest music labels (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group), but the prices (except for that super deal with Brooks’ catalogue) are about the same than on iTunes, going from 99 cents to $1.29, per song,… so what’s the attraction? It’s supposedly more artist-focused as artists can choose to sell their full album, or just their singles, or basically whatever they want, creating bundles to sell their music the way they want… yeah let’s say I am not impressed by the site and even less by Garth Brooks declaring ‘Music history is about to change’ on Good Morning America. So this is the future, each musician will launch his/her own music provider, and so what? What history does it change? May be Brooks’ history as this seems just a new platform to promote his two new albums. One last thing, why did he call the site Ghosttunes? Why not ghost town when he was at it? And I wonder when the site is gonna crash from all these upcoming Garth Brooks downloads.
