I Just Discovered Owl City

I got suckered yesterday. I was bamboozled by a really late April Fools; no joke.

I found a blog post that teased it's readers with having discovered a way to download both video and audio files from iTunes for free! I was like, wait...and then I was like, WAIT! I believed it because I also recently heard that someone in China had cracked the iTunes gift card serial code and was selling $100 cards for $4 or $5--Apple had to come out with a new policy that stated that consumers can't pay for laptops completely with gift cards. Some significant part of the bill must be paid with cash or credit.


Curious, I decided to follow the 6-step instruction process. I quickly read through the list of instructions looking for key scam-words such as, Nigerian Prince or "or your money back!" or "Guaranteed!" Nope. Everything looked straight forward.

I opened up iTunes and started browsing. I found a couple of TV shows I wanted to check out (including the iTunes original, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog. Overwhelmed by the Movie selection, I skipped to Music. Instead of looking up specific artists, I found an option to browse other user's iMixes by genre. I spent a full hour listening to the 30 second clips and saving the ones that I liked in a special playlist I was instructed to create. After a while, I had almost 100 songs that I thought looked really good. So I decided to take what I had and apply the final two steps of the instructions.

The trick behind the iTunes scam was that if you exported an .XML file of the playlist, named "_Phobos__Dnldstr_36c_", the file would contain the downloadable file names of all the files you saved to your playlist--bypassing the "checkout" screen. I realize that this is comparable to stealing 100 Snickers bars from the grocery store but I felt compelled to try it just to see if it would actually work.

I opened up the text file to find nothing even remotely similar to song file names. I checked back on the website to see if other users had the same "problem" I was experiencing. The first few commenters wrote things like, "not working" and "pleez help".  As my finger continued to scroll down to try to find anyone who had success, I noticed a similarity between all the comment posts. They were all posted on April 1st of last year!

It was then, that I realized I had been duped.

The scam wasn't a complete loss however. I ended up purchasing a few songs from iTunes that I really liked. (I bet the whole ploy was orchestrated by an iTunes administrator in order to get users to seriously look through their merchandise. Well it worked!) The songs I bought were all from the same artist, Owl City. Their genre is difficult to describe. It is definitely electronic, but beyond that, all I can say is their sound is a mix between three of my favorite bands:

• The Postal Service - Awesome electronic beats and rhythms.
• Death Cab for Cutie - Soft, soothing vocals.
• Brandtson [song, Nobody Dances Anymore] - Very danceable/Excellent road trip tunes.

If you have access to headphones (stereo sound), here are some of my favorite songs for you to look up:

Album: Maybe I'm Dreaming
Songs: West Coast Friendship, Early Bird, The Saltwater Room, The Technicolor Phase.

Album: Of June
Songs: Hello Seattle, Fuzzy Blue Lights, The Airway, Designer Skyline.

I do hope you get to enjoy the fruits of my dubious iTunes activity yesterday.