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What is a good website to buy legitimate MP3s?
I have a large music collection and I buy some vinyl, some CDs, but mostly MP3s. I've been using 7digital lately but I don't like how they have enlisted Paypal as their payment service. Is there any other sites out there to buy MP3s legitimately?
You can support many indie artists directly by buying through Bandcamp.
I second this. It’s where I buy most of my music these days. They let you download your purchases as normal audio files in whatever format you like (I tend to prefer FLAC). If it’s something older, I just buy the CD from eBay and rip the audio. It’s a bit old school and you need to be patient, but it doesn’t really bother me.
Discogs.com is another great website for finding CDs to rip (and vinyl). I've used it for random rarities that weren't for sale elsewhere.
Ok, I have looked at Bandcamp in the past but I was discouraged because I wasn't sure if the band pages I was looking at was legitimate or not. Some band pages looked to me like they were generated by random users based on how unprofessional they looked. I'll give it another go because I would like to support bands directly.
I once bought an album from a fake Bandcamp page that had been set up for a new release (“fake” as in “put up by someone who wasn’t the artist” — I was still on the actual Bandcamp platform itself).
The download worked and I got my music files and didn’t think anything of it. I only noticed later that the album stopped showing up in my collection. I messaged Bandcamp support and they acknowledged that the page was unauthorized and refunded my purchase.
I am a little bothered that I had to initiate that — if I hadn’t noticed the issue and brought it up, they might not have done anything (but who knows? maybe they were going to refund everyone I messaged them before they could move on that).
Anyway, if you ever do run into an issue with unofficial pages, I definitely recommend messaging support about it.
How did it stop showing up in your collection? Was there some form of DRM on the files?
oh I see
As someone who has a decent amount of experience in the business - a lot of legitimate bands have very unprofessional-looking sites, album art, etc.
In all my time using Bandcamp I've found this to happen, but quite rarely. The community often helps report and get that stuff taken down too. Bandcamp could be more proactive about it, though.
I think in the thousands of bands I've browsed, shared, etc I've encountered two fake ones.
If I can recommend an artist for you and everyone else to checkout on Bandcamp, I’m absolutely in love with the latest album from Bayonne called Temporary Time. I listen to it daily. His previous record Drastic Measures is great, too.
This is my primary place for buying music currently. CDs from eBay and other sites is a secondary.
Otherwise, I've been eyeing 7digital for things not on Bandcamp, or where CDs/physicals aren't worth it. They seem to have nice prices on a lot of things, and I'd prefer something like that to Amazon or Apple. I use Paypal (despite not loving it) so 7digital works well for me in that regard.
What other criteria do you have? I'm assuming you want something DRM free, since otherwise iTunes is the immediate and well known option.
Yes, DRM free, which iTunes is. But the problem is I no longer have a Mac and I haven't found a good way to run iTunes on Linux.
Really thats my only criteria. Cutting out as many middle-men as possible would be good.
Huh. For some reason I was under the impression iTunes had DRM but it looks like you’re right. I don’t know where I got that idea.
It's been a long time since I bothered with it, but I seem to remember that the Windows version worked fine with WINE.
I do wish they would get their store accessible from the web, though. Apple Music has improved in recent years but it still kinda sucks.
iTunes on Windows is trash though. I have to imagine iTunes through WINE is even worse
Eh, you only have to use it until you download the music you want. It's just a minor inconvenience.
I tried to get iTunes running in WINE maybe a little over a year ago, and I wasn’t able to get it off the ground.
I have a Windows PC hooked up to my TV for couch multiplayer gaming, but I keep an iTunes install on it as well so I can upload things to Apple Music and correct album names (I am more bothered than anyone ever should be when I see
(Deluxe Edition)on anything in my library).I just checked it out on WineHQ. Aparantly the 8.X and 9.X versions were silver while the 10.x and 11.X versions were garbage. The latest 12.X versions have a bronze rating, and the top comment says that 12.9.3.3 worked on Fedora with no fixes applied.
AHHHHH! It's me but with some unnecessary live tracks and worse cover art!
I can't wait for a few years from now when I can switch over to
(Taylor's Version). 😂The solution seems pretty obvious then - install windows.
I think I would rather record songs off the radio than do that
Yeah, but then you'd need to spend 7 weeks troubleshooting, recompiling stuff and writing your own drivers to get the radio to work
Agreed, in this current market iTunes is undisputed still, but comes with all the restrictions Apple puts on those purchases. I believe Amazon is likely second, but comes with the exact same restrictions from what I understand.
iTunes doesn't have any restrictions on the purchases. You buy it, you choose the file type you want, and then you download it to your hard drive to do whatever you want with.
huh, I was under the impression they had some kind of light DRM on their proprietary file type. But I didn't know they just allowed you to download whatever audio file type you want.
Their lossless music is encoded in ALAC which used to be proprietary, but Apple has since made it open source under the Apache license. AFAIK the only other kind they use is AAC.
They don't let you choose the type of file you get though, unless I'm missing something.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm actually looking more and more towards abandoning streaming as it gets more expensive and this makes me feel better about the options. Those years of DRM on every mp3 were a nightmare.
Amazon is completely DRM free in my experience.
If you want high quality music, don't buy from iTunes!
I'd go with Bandcamp or soundcloud first (check for free downloads, Bandcamp being better for hifi), then beatport, followed by literally any other site, and then finally I'd use iTunes as a last measure.
Back when I was buying individual albums digitally, I used Bandcamp (of course), 7digital (which you already mentioned), and Qobuz the most.
There are also a few niche stores that specialize in a specific genre or area of music (like Beatport). Also, check the artists’ websites directly. It’s rare, but occasionally they’ll have a digital download on offer.
EDIT: Dug through some old bookmarks. Here are a few more to throw on the pile:
I also used to use 7digital and now use Qobuz! I haven’t yet been unable to find music I was looking for on either Bandcamp or Qobuz, and the search and purchasing experience is dramatically better ok Qobuz than it was on 7digital.
That said, the most recent purchase I made on Qobuz seemed to force me to use their downloader application, and I’m not sure if that runs on Linux (I happened to be on my work MacBook at the time). I was sort of surprised, because previously there was always an options to download directly from the website!
I'm going to have to look into that. Qobuz has been my go to for awhile and some of that reason was the ease of downloading music without an external application.
To your point though, 7digital put me off a year ago when almost my entire library was inaccessible. I messaged support and they told me it was licensing, which I understand, but at the same time I've never had actual digital purchases removed from a library of any sort before.
Wake up call to check my backups Lol Luckily I found them on an old phone, so no big deal in the end. Especially since I just don't shop at 7digital anymore.
cc: @smores
I just logged into my Qobuz account (for the first time in a while) to check this. I didn't buy anything new, but I am able to download old purchases without using the app. Unfortunately, I have to do it on a track-by-track basis, which is quite tedious.
The site definitely pushes the app (which looks to be Windows only), but at present it looks like you can still download songs directly through a browser. If they take away that capability, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot pretty bad.
Also, I logged into 7digital to check my stuff there, and my library was completely empty. I was aghast, as I bought maybe close to 50(!) albums through them.
But then I refreshed the page and everything was there, and I felt a lot better. I have backups of everything I bought from there, so I'm not too worried, but that first page load gave me a genuine scare.
Yes, and sometimes the label will have a store.
HDTracks actually has some unique masters and remasters, so they're definitely worth looking into if you're an audiophile. They have a really good version of the album Fragile by Yes.
Their website has changed since I got that, and they now don't mention it at all, so they may not be doing that anymore.
Aside from iTunes, as was already said, that's a really good question. But kind of feels inefficient in this day and age, when streaming services are cheap. I have pirate-like tendencies though so I am biased.
Personally, I'd buy hard copies of albums and just rip 'em. Preferably second hand from a local music shop. New music might be trickier though.
I can think of a couple reasons to prefer actual files over streaming:
Streaming services generally need an Internet connection and that's not available everywhere (I know Spotify at least lets you download playlists for offline listening though).
You're locked to their music player, even with offline listening since they encrypt the files.
Artists receive such a pittance off your listen, it isn't a great way to support the artist. Hand in hand with this means your bucks may support individuals you do not want to give money to (I dropped Spotify after their Joe Rogan deal).
Owning the music. Licensing can cause tracks to get yanked off or block you regionally. Sometimes, artists will only list remasters or otherwise limit their discography too, which isn't necessarily preferred. I've got playlists with defunct Neil Young tracks because of his understandable decision to pull his discography, but now I'm left with an incomplete library.
The only feasible solution to a long term, stable library is owning the files, it's the same reason I run my own media server. I don't mean for this comment to be confrontational by the by, just additional considerations. I do think you're quite right about ripping from CDs (and Bandcamp like another person mentioned).
Totally agree with all your points, I manage my own tv/movie library but the way I listen to music these days just isn't conducive for me to buying/downloading something I like because with my pirate tendencies I might as well download a whole discography, then have to renumber all the tracks since they're always a mess, redownload because it was a low quality version, hunt for album art, etc. (I didn't say I was a good pirate, I'm sure there are ways around these issues) And even if it's buying a hard copy you still gotta find what you want, hope it's not scratched, and still normally have to gather all the track info yourself.
Through streaming I've also discovered so much new music which I've then gone on to go to shows, buy merch, and buy vinyls for. So yeah while they don't get much money from my listens, (and I don't think they got much from cd sales back in the day either), they get my money through better means like merch and going to shows. Also not trying to be confrontational, just trying to rationalize my own decisions! I forgot about Bandcamp, that's gotta be one of the best ways to support artists. A bunch of smaller bands I listen to are on there. So yeah, absolutely owning your music is the only true way to trust that your data is yours, but I've accepted the fact that I don't own my music because of the other benefits it provides.
One advantage of avoiding ripping discs is that you don’t accumulate clutter or generate waste. When I was getting rid of my CD collection of hundreds of albums (all of which I’d ripped to digital files), I cleared up a ton of space in my apartment, and I was also kind of horrified at just how much physical waste they became.
1990s me, when I started buying CDs, didn’t think about environmental impact at all. 2010s me was aghast at how much plastic I’d singlehandedly accumulated just to eventually throw away.
I hear what you’re saying (and get that OP asked for MP3s specifically), but most digital platforms now sell lossless files. Qobuz actually sells high-res lossless.
Also, it’s been a long while so maybe better hardware would change this, but I did some ABX testing for myself maybe 15 years ago on some nice headphones, and I couldn’t tell V0 MP3 files (much less 320 CBR) from FLAC ones.
It's still best to get lossless whenever possible, though, since further lossy transcoding can introduce artifacts. Besides, the thing that always bugged me about digital music stores is that they don't tell you all the details about the files they're selling, so you could be getting a terrible release and not know about it until you've already purchased it.
Yeah, no argument from me there. Disk space was a lot harder to come by back then so V0 was a compromise I was willing to make.
In my experience from the recent two-ish years that I bought all my music digitally, I didn’t really have issues with bad compression or anything (at least, not that I’m aware of). I did buy some albums that were clear loudness war casualties though, but that’s the case whether I listen to them in FLAC or in MP3.
The nice thing about MP3 is that it has actually gotten better with age. Modern LAME is going to produce better sounding audio than 90s LAME.
That being said, lossless compression is vastly preferable still.
Bandcamp, as mentioned. CDBaby if they released there, Beatport for EDM, but always try label websites as well. Many sell media directly to consumers, with digital being an option.
I'm just curious. Since you're buying anyway, aren't there better formats than MP3?
AFAIK all major online music stores offer music in lossless codecs such as FLAC/ALAC, except perhaps for some older releases where they were not provided lossless versions by the label. Amazon's MP3 store is the only one I am aware of that doesn't. And their quality is so atrocious that I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.
Lossy formats? Debatably. AAC has become the defacto standard but unless you're a sound engineer/audiophile or you're comparing wildly different bitrates you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference.
Lossless certainly there are better formats but maybe they are going to storage not raw quality, because, again, if you're not a sound engineer or audiophile you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference listening to them most people's audio equipment.
There is, and when I buy from 7Digital I opt for the .flac versions usually, but I just say MP3 in the general sense
I usually buy vinyl directly from the artists, then download FLAC files from a [redacted] (heh) source.
Bandcamp is now owned by Epic Games, in case you aren't comfortable giving Tim Sweeney money.
I haven't been paying attention to the Epic Games debacle at all, but that is good to know, thanks
What debacle? Is this just buying exclusives or fighting the app store?
I'm not sure if you're interested, but usually I buy the physical album and it comes with a free download of the mp3s. You can usually buy direct from the artist as well.
It might take a little research but some record labels do a good job of supporting the bands, one that comes to mind is Fat Wreck Chords, which I know is really only one style of music, but the last album I bought from them was $10 and they send a link to download the mp3's. They treat bands fairly and don't make them sign huge record deals (they can just record one album if they want)
If you are in the EU there is a good chance that downloading any mp3 is legitimate due to 'fair use' policy. For example in Poland downloading movies, books and music or copying it for personal use is 100% legal unless you share it with strangers. It is like that due to existence of such thing as "reprographic fee" or "private copying levy" we pay for blank media.
Have you looked at Magnatune? I'm not really a huge music listener/purchaser, but I did buy an album from there once.
I will check it out, thanks!