Uncompatible Systems

Mon, 31 Jan 2005

How to buy music in the post-CD era

I've recently started buying music again after a very long hiatus. This is what inspired this writing. I found it took a while to understand just what the hell is going on and how to make something work without falling into some hype.

Buying music gets harder and harder. With more formats than you can count on both hands and feet, greedy music industry gatekeepers going out of their way to insult their own customers, it's amazing anyone buys music at all anymore.

First, I'd like to outline some of the challenges to the poor music consumer faces:

1. CD copy protection which actually damages the disk to prevent you from playing it in an unknown percentage of CD players and CD/DVD-ROM drives. It also prevents you from ripping it to a portable.
2. A greedy music industry that is suing it's own customers as well as innocent bystanders.
3. A once progressive computer company that took a desperate risk and made a fortune by limiting the rights of it's users, requiring them to go out of their way to use the music they have bought.
4. The same once progressive computer company selling music online that is encumbered with restrictive digital right's management that makes it harder to make a mixtape from than a bunch of vinyl LPs. Unfortunately it appears all their effort was in vain but it inconviences their users once again because they need to use a different player application to bypass the DRM.

Whew! That was exhausting. So how the hell can anyone buy music anymore? Y'know, like the good old days of CD mixes on cassette tapes?

1. Search for the record you are looking for on Amazon.
2. Then use the RIAA Radar to determine if that artist's distributor is a mamber. They have a neato little popup utility that makes it quick and easy to get results from Amazon's item page.
3. If the title failed, open an account on All of mp3 and download the title from the Russians. It's currently 2 cents per megabyte downloaded. They are borderline legal, using legal loopholes to offer cheap music from major lables.
4. If your RIAA Radar search passed, the artist you are looking for is cool and has a cool distributor who respects musicians. First try and go to your local music store and pick up the CD. It's good to support your local music store.
5. If you don't happen to live in a fancy urban area with a good local record store, go directly to the distributor's web site. Most have a way to order the CD/LP online.
6. If that fails, buy the CD from Amazon if it's available.

So there you have it, buying music the modern way while sticking it to the man. In addition to finding a RIAA-free artist from the distributor's web site, there are some online retailers that sell CDs directly. In Sound is a good one. Sometimes even Ebay is better.

Of course the absolute best way to get music is to go see it live and buy a recording from the band. Obviously this is near impossible for those who aren't graced by a wonderful city like New York or LA. But hey, start your own venue. Play some punk rock, trade some music, do it yourself and make these corporations irrelevant and obsolete.

posted at: 17:12 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

About

I work with communications, open source software, sound and video. I'm the most happy when I work on all of these things at once. Sounds, Systems, Robots, Rocking Tigers.

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