Billy Burnette and the Four-Year iTunes Error

Billy Burnette plays a great rhythm guitar, and he earned most of his fame replacing Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac.  Billy was bred into a star musical family, and he also performs solo — but Billy’s greatest gift is to convey beauty in just strumming behind other guitar greats like John Fogerty as part of a backup band.  Rhythm guitar has taken a backseat to lead guitar in the foolish modern American musical mindset — but don’t be mistaken — there is honor and necessity in playing proper rhythm and Billy does it righteously well with his massive Gibson guitar always in hand.  After recently discovering Billy, I was eager to purchase his solo Blues album — Memphis in Manhattan — but when I went to the iTunes store to click buy, my eye was deceived.

Here is how Billy’s album currently appears in the iTunes store.  Instead of that beautiful color photo of Billy playing his Gibson in Times Square — “Memphis in Manhattan,” get it? — we are instead presented with an ugly grey and black album cover.

Is that Billy’s album or not?  I think not!

Billy’s album was released on January 6, 2006 — so this is a four-year iTunes Error!  Did nobody else care to notice and send iTunes a correction all this time?

Here’s a closer image of the ugly album cover wrongly representing Memphis in Manhattan in the iTunes store.

That image doesn’t have anything to do with Billy’s album — so I set off to do the right thing and let iTunes support know that they had the wrong cover art.

Simple, right?

Not.  So.  Fast.

A couple of days after I notified the iTunes store they had the wrong album art for Billy, I received a response back that Apple received my message — but the person responding to me had no power to do anything about the problem and the matter was being kicked up to a supervisor.

A few days later, I received an email from a supervisor who said she would check into the matter to verify if what I was claiming was true.

Two days after that, the same supervisor replied again and told me she had, in fact, confirmed the problem with Billy’s cover art and she was escalating the matter to “engineering” for a resolution.

To thank me for my time in reporting the issue, the iTunes supervisor gave me a five-song credit in the iTunes store:

The Apple iTunes folk were always chipper and helpful and quite lovely the entire way through — but it seems like there was a lot of back-and-forth going on behind the scenes just to correct what is an obvious, but simple to fix, mistake.

Billy’s album in the iTunes store, as of this writing, still reflects the ugly artwork.

In the interim, I was able to replace the proper art for the Memphis in Manhattan in iTunes.

You simply Right-Click on the song in iTunes, choose “Get Info” from the sticky menu; then pick “Artwork” and then delete the current image and add the one you want.

You have to do that process for every track on the album, but at least I was able to restore Billy’s proper art to his album as you can see below — and I used the album image you saw earlier in this article for the fix.

Billy Burnette is 57 years old and in December, he had quintuple heart bypass surgery.

Billy, we wish you all the best, and we hope you have a continued speedy recovery — and don’t worry about a thing:  We got your back in the iTunes store, so you just sit back and strum and relax some!