Buying Silence

A little modern art music comedy: Purchasing all-silent tracks from iTunes. An excerpt:

djsteve had purchased a track that cost him the "best 99 cents [he'd] ever spent." The joke, of course, was that it was the second track from The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth, which consists of a minute and three seconds' worth of silence. To tell you the truth, while we're amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o' nothing, we're even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. And the most amusing thing of all, of course, is that the song has a thirty-second preview.

Well, as it turns out, the Ciccone Youth track is by no means the only all-silent untune for sale at the iTMS…we've compiled all the silent tracks we managed to scrape together…three of those tracks, the ones by Slum Village, are labeled EXPLICIT. We've listened to them, and we have to agree: combined, that's the dirtiest fifteen seconds of utter silence we've ever not heard. It's so dirty, it's like Handel's Messiah, only, you know, quiet.
….[Their list contains] nine tracks of professionally-encoded silence– a total of six minutes and forty-four seconds of the yawning void, all yours for just $8.91.

See the link for the full list, and happy listening!