Unless I missed an e-mail, no one seems to have taken McCloud's "I Can't Stop Thinking," so I'll offer a few spontaneous thoughts (apologies if anyone did indeed ask for this article).

Isn't it interesting that Apple has indeed done what McCloud suggested in his strip on micropayments, with iTunes and the digital music store (forgive me for yet again referring to my much-beloved computer company)? For a flat rate of 99 cents, anyone can download any song carried in the catalog, and with the exception of some classical pieces which, unfortunately, Apple portions up and charges the dollar per slice, that rate of payment is simple and uniform no matter the genre, music label, artist, length of song, etc. It doesn't matter if the song is a rare, eighty-year-old Roaring Twenties ditty or the latest single by the most popular of artists (for example, does anyone else think like I do that Jive Records manages to up the price on Justin Timberlake music and extras because he's so popular right now, people will pay anything to hear Sexyback? - not on iTunes). Furthermore, iTunes itself is a free download, in spite of the fact that it is a highly complex, much sought-after application, and could probably generate a great deal of revenue for Apple were it to be sold for $29.99 (even bumbling Microsoft is intelligent enough to offer their much-inferior, and at least on my computer, rarely-working Media Player for free). I remember the spider-monkey chatter discussing the probability of iTunes Music Store success that abounded when Apple made the 99-cent-flat-rate-no-strings-attached-100%-legal announcement, and how many folks believed that the types of people (demographics, I suppose: dangerous to stereotype humans - not all digital music fans are the teenagers we see wreaking havoc in "Hackers") who had caught the digi-music wave would be willing (or have the financial means; "Daddy, can I borrow a dollar and your credit card before I practice for our 5th grade program?") to pay for the music they were getting for free off Napster two months previous. And now (one moment while I jump over to my own iTunes for statistics) iTunes houses more than 3.5 million songs (not to mention movies, television shows, games, etc.) and has sold more than 2 billion songs worldwide. I'd say it's a success story.

My list of why iTunes works for me:
1. Stability: I know the songs I'm downloading are the highest quality, free of viruses, and legal. No strings attached, no letters in the mail from the FCC saying I've been caught pirating, no hard-drive corrupting worms wound around Britney Spears'...ahem...lovely voice, no fuzzy digital noise/garbage in the middle of that song I so desperately wanted to own.
2. Versatility: I can have these songs anywhere I want. iPod them, burn them, plug in the headphones. I've got them in stereo on my computer at my desk, on the road in my car, or walking down the street. They're compact (hey, it's digital information: may as well be air I'm carrying around for all the physical room it takes to store 200 songs in my pocket these days), instantaneously accessible (no more waiting for the tape to fast forward, no more waiting for the laser-head to catch up after you hit skip 16 times, no more trying to remember if the song you really liked is number five or number eleven, and damn! how annoying! they both sound about the same for the first thirty seconds!), and so far have a much better shelf life (in my experience) than records, tapes, or even CDs. I've yet to have a single song file corrupt or go bad on me, but even the supposedly indestructible CD has fallen victim in my collection to a scratch or a skip here or there.
3. Discrimination: this is actually the most important one for me as a consumer - with iTunes, I have the ability to be a very discriminating customer and ensure what I buy is exactly what I want and nothing I don't. Bottom line: I love music, but I've never made more than a marginal yearly income in my life, and frankly, 18 bucks a CD is a lot, especially when I'm probably going to really like less than a third of the songs on the album. Prime example: the infamous Goo Goo Dolls CD, "A Boy Named Goo," with the song "Name," which helped Goo to break into the main-stream and become the powerhouse band they are/were for the past decade, but which also was the only remotely decent song on the album. There was a time I remember when "A Boy Named Goo" was the butt of jokes, being that one CD that everyone had owned at one time because they'd rushed out to pick up a copy after hearing "Name," but quickly pawned off to the local used CD shop after realizing it was a four-minute jewel amongst an hour+ of underground post-grunge sewage. Once everyone caught on, I would daresay there was a point when the Warner Bros. label couldn't have paid people to take a copy. Thanks to iTunes, everyone has their beloved "Name" at a price they can afford without paying the extra 17 dollars for background noise they don't want. In spite of arguments to the contrary, I now personally spend more money than I ever did in the past on music (legal, nonetheless), and am much more satisfied. Record companies housing one-hit-wonders are making money off me where they would never have in the past world pre-iTunes. In fact, amazingly (no one is more surprised than I) I've spent nearly $200 myself on iTunes downloads over the past three years. I've never minded paying a lousy buck for a song I like, and doubt I ever will. And guess what...I still DO buy CDs when I like the album overall.

To sum it all up, I think McCloud is on-target with micropayments, and iTunes has proven it. In fact, in my case, I found my online-shopping experiences (whether it be iTunes, Amazon.com, or elsewhere) to be on the whole much more satisfying than my real-life purchases, and I have in fact, purchased many artistic works (movies, books, music, posters and paintings) online that I wouldn't have picked up in an actual store because through various avenues, online dealers have made these works of art more accessible and more affordable.

So this is a narrow response to one argument in one of the strips, but I've already said too much!