Speaking of the iTunes Music Store, what's up with the Incredible Shrinking Selection over there these days? Sure, Apple made a big deal about adding 3200 new songs last week, but what the company didn't tell anyone is that several songs have since gone missing. We can only hope that Apple publicly addresses this distressing phenomenon and provides a reasonable explanation before rumors of music-devouring trolls infesting Apple's servers spread to Wall Street and trigger a massive stock price collapse.

We first heard tell of songs evaporating last Thursday, in a PowerPage article claiming that Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey" had mysteriously vanished from the store's list of offerings between the time the author added the song to his shopping cart and the point at which he actually attempted to check out and make his purchase. At the time we assumed it was an isolated store-engine glitch, or maybe someone reported a problem with the encoded version of that one song and it was subsequently pulled temporarily, and thus we didn't get alarmed. Heck, for all we knew, said incident never really happened at all, and the anonymous PowerPage author was simply coming down off a bad acid trip. (Psychedelic drug use among anonymous authors is at an all-time high. Just say no, kiddies.)

But then we noticed that a MacInTouch reader confirmed that other Van Morrison songs had gone bye-bye. Meanwhile, MacMinute reported that all Radiohead songs had also since disappeared, including the album OK Computer, which a MacMinute reader had previously purchased from the store, and suddenly the music-devouring troll scenario started to look a little more plausible. Well, don't worry, folks; our own sources report that this is not the work of trolls, not is it the result of some bizarre anti-Van-Morrison-and-Radiohead vendetta undertaken by His Steveness during a particularly intense mercurial streak. The real reason these tracks are no longer available at the iTMS is simply because they're sold out.

Yup, it seems that Apple grossly underestimated the demand for songs by these two artists and stocked far fewer copies than it probably should have; as a result, inventory was depleted way more quickly than anticipated, and those sold-out tracks will remain unavailable until a new shipment arrives. Don't fret, though-- we're told that the record companies have Van Morrison and Radiohead chained up in a studio somewhere, cranking out copy after copy of the depleted songs, which will soon be freighted to Apple and placed back on the shelves at the iTunes Music Warehouse. Oh, the pains of poor inventory management...