Weekend Edition's Eco-nomical Holidays series on saving money and the environment got me thinking: More than ever, music makes the perfect gift. Changes in the way music is sold have made it easy to be environmentally friendly, since downloaded music does away with plastic packaging and discs.
The most popular digital download program, of course, is Apple's iTunes. You can buy iTunes gift cards just about anywhere, but you needn't even buy the plastic card — just log on and send a load of music credit to a friend. Amazon also sells a lot of MP3s. Then there's indie-label-centric eMusic and (the now-legal) Napster and a whole raft of sites that operate on a subscription model, including Rhapsody. One great advantage of Rhapsody is that it allows you to listen to entire songs before you buy them (a feature long-overdue from iTunes).
Anyway, on to the 10th annual Director's Cuts gift guide. While we wait for Steve Jobs to post full iSamples, you can hear my recommendations in full here and buy the songs as an iTunes playlist using this link below:
iMix: Director's Cuts Music Gift Guide 2008 (Requires iTunes)
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
