Robert Fripp's Diary

iTunes

I return from my brief holiday to discover that those kind souls on the DGM guestbook have invented an entirely new source of income for us. This wonderfully simple and gloriously devious plan involves slipping a tiny piece of unreleased material onto each of the King Crimson albums on iTunes, thereby forcing the diehard collector to rush to the iTunes store to re-acquire a downgraded version of the music they already own. Perhaps not a plot worthy of Punk Sanderson and The Vicar, but certainly in keeping with the cruel, heartless businessmen we aspire to be. If only…

For the avoidance of doubt, let me assure everyone that I did NOT have carnal relations with that woman. Sorry. Wrong denial. That we are NOT adding any unreleased material to the downloads. Those who have supported DGM with their extremely hard-earned and much-appreciated dollars/pounds/euros/yen can save them for more worthwhile causes (and we do of course, have a few to suggest). We have added the music to iTunes as it is one of the places where new, often next-generation, fans find their music, and unlike some of the other digital music providers, it offers a fair return to the artists.

The albums have been re-mastered and tweaked to make them work in an iTunes format. In particular, iTunes will only allow you to “protect” (make “album-only”) tracks that are over ten minutes long. So when we make are making album extras, there is a rationale for making these over ten minutes long. The ten-minute extra on the Discipline album which sparked the debate is made of Stormy outtakes all of which have already been available free on this site. (Although having created the edit, I will, of course, point out that it makes a masterful remix – and we will be adding it to one of the forthcoming re-issues).

For those who wish to play “spot the difference”, there is a far more exciting variation on one of the albums, which I had long since expected to be raised on the guestbook – but by mentioning it, I am, of course, forcing fans to re-purchase the entire catalogue on iTunes to find it…