I’ve started buying CDs again, for a few reasons. Mainly because I refuse to pay the disgusting prices charged for legal music downloads - an album from iTunes UK will cost you £7.99. What do you get for your 8 quid? Technically, you get nothing. You get data. And it’s compressed data at that, so you get inferior sound quality. If you took ten quid into an HMV store tomorrow you’d be able to buy one of the very same albums, and you’d actually get a CD in a case plus the accompanying insert to hold in your hands and cherish for years to come.

When I decide that a record is worthy of purchase, I want to get my money’s worth, and recently I’ve discovered quite a bit of stuff that is worthy of purchase. That’s why I will never ever buy a legal download and I will buy CDs even if it costs me 150% of the price (although I rarely buy CDs that are over a tenner, as you just need to wait until they turn up in a sale somewhere).

I can’t imagine what happens when you need to reinstall Windows XP (chosen purely as an example) and you want to keep hold of your music download collection. You can’t just whack all your tracks onto your iPod to keep them safe, because you’ll find that you can’t get them off it and back onto your PC again thanks to the wonder that is DRM.

This is quite interesting, although I don’t agree with all of what is said on the site.

The majority of CDs I’ve bought recently haven’t been anywhere near a corporate scum record label, and therefore won’t be found on iTunes. CDBaby.com is my new favourite online music store. They only sell CDs by independent musicians, and you can listen (via streaming MP3) to up to 2 minutes of each track from the CDs available on the site. For example, the latest CD I bought from there is You’ve Got Cousins by Meryll. You can listen to 2 minutes of every single track on the CD (except for Classy as it’s only 1:40 long), completely freely, without registering or joining or paying or anything. To top it all, it only cost me $10 (less than £6) and Meryll will have directly received at least $6 (over 50%!) from the sale, which is at least $4 more than if it was sold through a major record label.

Now, obviously there was a reason that for a period of about 12 months leading up to Summer 2005 I only bought 3 CDs. That reason was called WinMX, but, alas, the RIAA have decided that the P2P system which WinMX uses is encouraging illegal music sharing and have forced WinMX, among others, to close down by means of a cease and desist order. Shame.

Oh well, onto the next filesharing app.

This entry was posted by Bon on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 3:36 AM and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.