However, more than just a fresh, shameless championing of the pervasiveness of PC culture, the BuyMusic ads seemed to slyly insinuate that Apple, its service and, ergo, its users were, gasp, snobby elites. This is a sober indictment for Apple given the many campaigns the brand has undertaken to appear more human and “people-friendly” than its PC counterpart. So, boob-tube-ballyhooing aside, what do the actual websites say about each of these brands?

Apple.com/iTunes
iTunes is exactly what one would expect from Apple and fits perfectly with its current brand image. A clean site, iTunes doesn’t make use of many colors in its hygienic functional presentation. The whites, blues and stainless-steel metallic skins serve to impart an almost clinical vibe to its homepage. An aqua-green gel-like stripe across the top of the page delineates various iTunes options such as “Download,” “iLife” and “Music Store” among others. There is little attention to actual artists and a great deal of exposition on such subjects as downloading music and the Apple iPod, the digital music device for making one’s music mobile.

The iTunes actual “Music Store” deserves praise for two reasons. The first is that Apple, as might be expected, has designed a rather user-friendly window for browsing titles and tracks. There are, of course, numerous options for creating personalized folders and searching for that rare 1980 Bee Gees “Live in Liverpool” track. Secondly, referencing iTunes own one-set-price policy for songs, the site’s invitation to “Shop the first online 99¢ store” is, while obvious, still refreshingly self-effacing.

BuyMusic.com
Hey! Music here! Hey, come over here and get some music! C’mon! Music here! In clear homage to its huckster parent site buy.com, BuyMusic’s homepage uses no less than six exclamation points to get its point across about such things as downloading being as “easy as 1…2…3!” “302,000 songs -- for your PC!” and getting “loaded” like Tommy Lee. (By comparison, the iTunes site uses no exclamation marks.) It shouldn’t be necessary to go into the reasons why exclamation marks are such a tawdry (and suspicious) cyber-sales tactic, but anyone who has ever encountered an overly-ambitious and boisterous bricks and mortar salesman should understand.