And this I consider good news, because – with the exception of Amusement Pack – I haven’t yet met an album of theirs that I didn’t like.

And, to be fair, I probably would have liked Amusement Pack better if I was, you know, fluent in Japanese and all that so I could get the point of the interstitial spoken-word tracks.  So I don’t hold that against the band, not too much anyway.

On the other hand, I wasn’t about to drop the money to import their new album back in April because, well, the whole quitting my job and going back to school thing.

On the third hand, most of their library is available on iTunes, and substantially cheaper.  It just tends to lag behind the disc releases by a few months.

So I’ve been checking the Japanese iTunes store every couple of weeks, when I remember it, and I noticed last night that Superluminal was finally available for the low low price of Y1500. (about 16 bucks)

I clicked the “Buy album” link, got presented with the typical iTunes dialog box of “Are you sure you want to buy this?”, and had a sudden feeling of “wait, I shouldn’t push this button yet…”

Turns out it’s actually available on the US store, for $9.99.  Who would have guessed?

But I digress.

Anyway, as I said, we’ve been watching this show, which is to say that I’ve seen the first 8 episodes or so and my wife is almost done with the fourth season but is occasionally deigning to drop back to the first season and watch an episode.

Anyway, she’s been quite liking the incidental music, which I find funny as all hell because it’s basically the soundtrack of my teenage years.  You’ve got your Kansas, your Boston, your Rush… and your AC/DC.

I figured this was a great chance to share some of my formative tunes with her, so I took a look through our iTunes library and noticed a rather shocking omission:  I don’t own any AC/DC any more.

See, part of that whole “soundtrack of my teenage years” means this:  I had an awful lot of AC/DC cassettes.  Spot the significant word, there.

No worries, I thought; I have a bit of credit with Amazon so I’ll just buy, oh, the dozen or so really standout AC/DC tracks and call it good.  It’s not like a dozen tracks would encompass everything good they did, but it would hit most of the high marks.

They’re not on Amazon, and come to find out, they’re not on iTunes either.  I did a quick google on “AC/DC digital distribution” and found several news articles which confirmed that they’re one of the few remaining holdouts; they don’t sell their music online and – as a further search revealed -  they have never released a “best of” album outside of a promo.

Now: AC/DC is one of the biggest acts of all time and sell millions of albums a year, so it’s not like selling through iTunes is likely to be much of a priority for them.  Refusing to do that, or to put out a greatest hits album, may be a little arrogant, but when you’re a group like them, you’ve earned the right to be a lot arrogant.

I thought about just getting their music through less aboveboard methods and then realized, while I could do that – and easily -  I’m not going to.

All my AC/DC albums were on cassette and I’d never thought to upgrade them. They were a part of my teenage years that I hadn’t deemed necessary to bring forward into adulthood.  It’s nice to occasionally hear one of their songs on the radio or, in Supernatural’s case, as part of the incidental music, but I don’t really feel like I need on-demand AC/DC.

Weird feeling.