Garth Brooks has launched his own alternative to iTunes

Garth Brooks, long a holdout from allowing his music to be sold on iTunes, lifted the lid Thursday on his alternative, GhostTunes, a new download and streaming service that the newly unretired country superstar said “allows artists to sell music any way they want to.” Brooks’ beef with iTunes is that it is grounded in selling singles, while Brooks says he wants his music sold as complete albums to protect the songwriters and music publishers who depend on income from tracks included on those recordings.

In an attempt to bypass Apple’s structured pricing model on iTunes, country musician Garth Brooks has helped launch a new digital music service that allows artists to set pricing when selling music. Calling the service GhostTunes, this marks the first time that Brooks has made his music available for purchase in a digital format. Brooks has long shunned music download services like Apple’s iTunes and music streaming services like Spotify or Pandora. Interestingly, Brooks owns his master recordings and would have made considerably more than other artists considering how popular the distribution model of services like iTunes and Spotify are in the United States.