Earn Free iTunes Music and Loving Podcasts

I learned today that if you buy a gift certificate for iTunes using your PayPal account, you get a little kick-back from Apple

* Buy a $20 gift certificate-get 10 free songs

* Buy a $50 gift certificate-get 25 free songs

How cool is that. You have to start on this page when ordering, but once you do the gift certificate will be sent to whoever you want it for and your iTunes account will be credited for the extras.

Personally, I'm thinking Heather and I should just buy some gift certificates for ourselves and get extra music for our money.

Speaking of iTunes, I am totally loving two new podcasts that you can find there. One is the Ricky Gervais Show and the other is the Sound Opinions podcast.

I've always been a fan of Sound Opinions, the world's only rock n' roll radio talk show that previous aired weekly on WXRT. Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, music critics for the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune respectively, recently took their show over to the Chicago Public Radio station, and with the move have given listeners a whole bunch of new ways to listen to them.

I never got to listen to the show as much as I wanted. There just wasn't time at home in the evenings to sit and listen to a radio program. But now that they are making their weekly sixty minute program available as a podcast I am eating them up.

The Ricky Gervais Show is a newer discovery. I saw that it was the most popular podcast on iTunes and I knew Ricky's name as the guy who created the original "The Office" for the BBC before NBC brought it to the states. What was remarkable was that the podcast got to be #1 on iTunes with only having one podcast out there. I had to give it a try.

The show is simply Rick, his "The Office" co-creator Steve Merchant, and a guy named Karl Pilkington. During the 30-minute long podcast Ricky and Steve "trawl the shallow depths of the mind of their co-host Karl Pilkington." Translation: it's a damn funny show.

There are only going to be 12 shows (so they say), so I'm looking forward to riding this through and getting some good laughs. Episode two is already out there, but I haven't had a chance to listen yet. I just got caught up on Sound Opinions listening this morning.