From this morning's Business Day (which on Mondays for the past decade has carried the unnerving subtitle, "The Information Industries"):
Steve Halberstadt of Raleigh, N.C., made such a purchase last week after discovering that Apple's iTunes store, the Web's leading downloadable music outlet, had added "The Whitey Album," a 1995 release by Ciccone Youth, a jokey side project of the rock band Sonic Youth. The album's second track album, "Silence," consists of 63 seconds of exactly that. (The band has said, with tongue in cheek, that the track is a version of John Cage's famous silent composition "4'33"," only speeded up.)
After checking out the 30-second preview, which "seemed to be very representative of the rest of the song," Mr. Halberstadt said he could not help but make the purchase.
He described it as "the best 99 cents I've ever spent''
Using the readers' suggestions, Mr. Miller compiled a playlist of "nine tracks of professionally encoded silence, a total of 6 minutes and 44 seconds of the yawning void," downloadable from iTunes for just $8.91. He noted that as with all iTunes purchases, antipiracy measures allow the silence to be enjoyed on no more than three computers.