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What has your experience been like buying digital music?
I've been wanting to buy some music recently from some artists that are only available through places like Amazon, iTunes, Google Play... However, I have specifically stayed away from most of these platforms for various reasons, the primary one being that I prefer Bandcamp over all of them (and up to now I never had the need to go anywhere else anyway).
So my question is, have you bought any music from these types of platforms online and what was the experience like?
Some specifics for what I'm personally looking to get out of this topic (you don't have to answer these if you don't want to, general experiences are fine too):
- Can I buy music through my browser alone? This one's primarily aimed at iTunes, because when I go to Apple Music and click on the "Also available in the iTunes Store" button for a particular song or album, nothing happens. So I'm assuming it's trying to launch iTunes which I don't have installed.
- Is the music available in multiple audio formats and can I pick whichever one I want after purchase? This is what I like a lot about Bandcamp, you buy the music once and it gives you a bunch of different audio formats to choose from.
- Did the audio files come with metadata and cover art attached (and were they accurate)? This one's not a big deal overall since stuff like Picard exists, but it's just a nice thing to not need to worry about.
I love bandcamp.
I bought some music from Amazon. They told me my music would be kept in their server, and that I could download copies. A few years later I realised I'd lost my local copy, so went back to Amazon. They'd had a big change, and some of my music was no longer available. I did get a refund, but it was kind of annoying that I had to 1) notice and 2) ask.
I try really hard to use bandcamp, or the artists or record label's own site, and I use Amazon as a last resort.
I have about 80 GB of music, in a variety of formats, but most of it is MP3. I try to avoid having more than one copy of the same thing.
The music I like the most is really obscure in my country, so I have absolutely scoured the internet for good legal means to get my music. And let me tell you, it is stunning how often the pirate albums are better - especially because pirate versions tend to be available in lossless formats as of late.
Insofar as legal music goes Bandcamp is above and beyond everyone else. Bandcamp has lossless formats for virtually everything, and that is world's above everyone else, especially because many of them do not offer lossless whatsoever.
While I would never consider myself an audiophile - I listen to most of my music on my cell phone with $15 earbuds - I am picky about my audio quality. And I have to say that music can sound just about perfect when put through lossy compression if it has been properly engineered. So please keep that in mind.
Amazon MP3 is the worst of the bunch. I have bought so many albums that were poorly transcoded, and because they only offer MP3 there is no lossless options whatsoever. The only positive is that they do not use DRM, but honestly that is the bare minimum you have to do to do business with me.
Dont get me wrong, some of the albums are just fine, but some are abominable. I bought a copy of Red Moon by Kalafina and it sounds like it was re-encoded six times after recording it from the "dial up quality" stream of an internet anime radio station.
iTunes is pretty good, but lacks transparency. Apple has a legitimately good service here. The music I bought through them is well mastered and I think that they must be manually approving each song and album. And minus a few rather famous exceptions, they will let you redownload your music.
The lack of transparency comes from not being able to tell what form your music will be in. Apple does have lossless music but they don't seem to actually have any differentiation of them. They are DRM free now, but because they used to be exclusively DRMed, I have an honest fear that if I buy any older music it might still have DRM on it.
Every other store I have bought from, I would describe as boutique, and in spite of their differences they are all the same. They offer high quality music, often lossless and at higher costs. And of course, they all have tiny selections. For the most part, I would recommend them. Every single one.
Everything else has gone away or in some cases have actually turned into streaming services. I'm not going into streaming services because I don't use any of them. They would need to have all the music I listen to, and none of them do. Though I have to say that Spotify is the closest, and I didn't have any issues with quality when I tried them out.
I bought an album from Amazon last week. I rarely purchase downloads from anyone other than Bandcamp, and I usually prefer physical copies, but in this case I needed a particular song for my radio show and Amazon was the only way to get it quickly. I was not given a choice of format. The files were VBR MP3s. Purchase and downloading were very easy, but I wish they offered lossless files. The files came with an image of the front cover, and the basic metadata (song titles, composers, release year) was correct, but personnel and other info you would expect to get from liner notes was missing.
Not going to lie, I used to pirate my content before the days of ad-supported streaming since I don't really have the resources to spend on 'extras' like music/movies/TV - now I just stream Spotify or buy the occasional album on Bandcamp so the artist still gets some form of kickback. I honestly hate the current state of streaming services though, some content being exclusive to certain platforms and having to pay a $10-15/month subscription for each platform (it's even worse with the exclusivity wars between Netflix/Hulu/HBO and now Disney apparently).
As for what the best way to buy digitally is legally, I don't think there's any good answer to that. Spotify dominates the music scene and has the largest catalogue but pays peanuts to the artists, Bandcamp seems the most 'ethical' and allows FLAC downloads but lacks the sheer number of popular artists.
In an ideal world I'd just buy something upward of $30 from an artist like an album/merch item/whatever and be able to torrent their discography in full FLAC/WAV quality with good conscience since it's multiple times more than the few dollars they'd make from me streaming their music over my lifetime - if even just half the western world tried something like that musicians could actually have some degree of sustainability to their career without having to shit out a few multi-platinum singles.
TLDR; Semi-jaded musician/audio guy laments the state of creative media industries and digital-era distribution platforms by monkeying the hell out of his proverbial typewriter until something somewhat relevant to the thread topic materialises :)
Honestly if I buy X I don't see a problem with then pirating it. Sometimes its just a more convenient way to get to the product.
I buy MP3's from Amazon. They have a download app but I don't think you need to use it. You don't get a choice of audio formats, but they sound fine to me and they're not copy-protected. I haven't had any issues with metadata.
Since getting Spotify I've been buying less music, though. Sometimes burning a CD to listen to in the car is more convenient than using the Spotify app on my phone.
Wait -- please go into more detail about how preparing physical media and waiting for the burn process and bringing said media (in multiplicate) and managing it in your vehicle(s) is more convenient than using an app on a single device that you almost always bring with you whenever you go out. (Not being sarcastic or poking fun. Genuinely curious.)
Well, I have an older car, so I find it more convenient than using the aux jack after the CD is in the CD player. It starts playing when I turn on the engine, and all the car stereo's controls work.
I got in the habit when the headphone jack broke on my phone, though that was a few phones ago.
But people who have a newer car stereo with Bluetooth or some other fancy phone integration might find that better.
I feel this. Even with a new car and entertainment dash and native phone integrations and whatnot, if you know what you want to listen to, and if you usually listen to the same stuff in the car, having your music queued up to just start playing via disk is less effort and doesn't require unlocking your phone or opening an app or searching or seeking. Just play.
I use my phone for music in the car and it's convenient when I wanna listen to anything outside of what I'd normally go for, but for a long time I just had my favorite albums or mixes burned to disk in my old car and just let them play.
I've bought a bunch of music from 7digital. You can do it all in the browser, but they have an app for convenience as well. Most releases are available in several bitrates and formats. I have bought a couple of bad releases, i.e., with glitches from bad CD rips, but their support is always quick to respond (refund and take the release offline pending a fixed release) when I report.
7digital is fantastic and a great alternative to most other large stores, especially when you can't find something you want on bandcamp .
I've never actually pirated music and I don't really get into the whole streaming thing that seems to dominate nowadays. I'm actually rather annoyed by it since I like to build playlists to listen to specific songs, albums, or genres, and the nature of the streaming services I have tried allow you to listen to the first song you pick and build a 'station' of recommended songs around that first choice.
I buy all of my music through iTunes, to the tune of around $100 a year. It doesn't really help your points since you can't buy it through your browser or choose the format, but it's been DRM free for a long time and they always have whatever I am looking for. It feels like a pretty fair system to me. From my experience the audio files do come with correct metadata and cover art.
For any other music needs, I typically just use youtube to listen to a one-off song or to sample it a few times to get an earbug out of my system. If I really do like it or it leads me to explore the artist more, I'll usually go purchase that song or album for myself.
It sounds like you tried Pandora? Spotify is different, you can listen to the songs you pick and make your own playlists. Many playlists are public (your choice when you make one) and you can find interesting stuff by looking at other people's playlists. They do have recommendations but you don't have to use them.
I did try Pandora, and I actually do use Spotify, but only for podcast curation. Why would I want to either pay, or listen to ads for music I could otherwise own?
I don't mind paying Spotify's subscription fee and I use it essentially for looking up random artists I hear about and bookmarking any tracks I like. I'm a bit reluctant to pay more for tracks I've only listened to once or twice, but I still want to keep track of them, and hitting "like" is the minimum-friction way to do that.
In theory, I would eventually buy them, but I seem not to get around to it much.
Another iTunes and AppleMusic listener here. If I buy it's through iTunes, if I just want to listen it's through AppleMusic which can play specific songs or build stations around a song, artist, or genre, and which also has curated playlist and "radio channels" with actual DJs and talking if you want that for some reason. You can create your own playlists and I think you can share them, though I don't use that functionality myself.
I've flat rejected Apple Music, mostly because of Apple's push to try to get me to use it. Every. Single. Time. I would open iTunes it would instead insist I actually wanted to use Apple Music. I was so annoyed by it I started using a different music app on iOS. I just wanted to listen to the music I wanted, not sign up for some Apple music streaming service.
I still take the stance that if they won't make it available, I won't buy it. I was lucky when I bought stuff through Amazon that I did it when they, first, allowed you to just download the files, and later when there was an exploit in their system that allowed you to bypass their lockdown. I'm even more fortunate that the artists I do listen to are available either through their label directly, or for the truly independent, they'll have at least a Bandcamp or CDBaby page. I only buy CDs on Amazon when they'll cost as much as the disk to ship (here's to you, Rammstein) or there's something kinda hard to find.
I've bought Music digitally from Bandcamp and from iTunes. (I also got a few MP3 downloads from Amazon for buying the physical CD), but I'll only comment on iTunes.
No, I don't think so. You might be able to play them via the Apple Music webapp, but I'm not sure if it requires an active Apple Music subscription or if it lets you lissten to your purchased library as well.
No, it's 256kbps AAC (variable bitrate IIRC). You might be able to tell iTunes to download them with a lower bitrate, but I'm not 100% sure of it. Losless and 320 kbps is not possible,
Yep, they were always tagged and tagged correctly, including cover art. I disagree with iTunes on genre sometimes, but that's the only issue. Importing a CD into your library sometimes has incorrectly tagged metadata (thanks Gracenote CDDB), but the stuff I have bought never gave me any trouble so far
A significant portion of my music library was obtained legally through a service that no longer exists. Now I've been trying to figure out how to proceed. I would like to restart buying albums, but there thought of buying something without knowing I will enjoy it doesn't sit well with me.
So maybe I could use streaming services. The problem is that they are all non-private. So I try to avoid those.
I think I will start to do once better financial times arrive is to just buy the album, as a sort of good will gesture to the artist whose product I've enjoyed in the past. If I end up not liking it then I guess I won't buy the next one.
My logic is: if it’s not on Bandcamp it’s not music
Yeah, bandcamp seems the most ethical of the digital distribution platforms, and also takes significantly less cut from the artists than the others, so it's the only place I buy music online these days too.
I used to buy a ton of music from iTunes/Apple Music in the past, but so many songs (and even entire albums) have mysteriously disappeared from my library over the years (due to licensing issues?) with no warning whatsoever (a little heads up would have been nice so I could have archived them!), resulting in me no longer being able to download them anymore (despite having payed for them!), that I have stopped using it entirely and will likely never go back.
I guess I never thought of backups as part of the deal. For music I want to own, I buy an mp3 from Amazon, download it immediately, and don't expect to interact with them again at all.
See, I don't consider the ability to actually download what I have purchased as being a "backup", largely because Apple calls it my "Library" in both iTunes and the Apple Music app, and because of the streaming feature in both I never actually had to physically download them onto my devices to listen to them in the first place. The only time I ever did download stuff was when I wanted to listen to it when I didn't have internet access, which was, and still is, extremely rare for me. However as soon as I did have internet access again, I typically deleted it all again, because I didn't want to clog up my mobile devices limited storage space.
So because of all that, I find it exceptionally annoying that, despite me having purchased it all, Apple will occasionally disappear a whole bunch of stuff from my Library... especially since they do so without any warning beforehand so I can't even make backups of that content before they do. That and since my iTunes Library was (and still is) exceptionally large, even identifying what they have removed from it over time can be rather difficult, because not only do they give you no warning, but they don't even ever inform you at any point after the fact either. I only know they have done so because several albums I purchased through them are no longer available to me, some of my albums (e.g. Life Aquatic Soundtrack) weirdly have a whole bunch of random tracks missing from them now, and if I go back into my purchase history all the missing stuff is still listed there despite no longer being available to me.
p.s. Don't get me wrong though, I have zero problems with simply pirating what I already purchased but no longer have access to, so it's no big loss for me... it's just an annoyance I would rather not deal with, and especially not pay for. And at least with bandcamp the expectation is there from the beginning that you are simply paying to download that material. However, TBH since I mostly buy stuff there to support the artists, not to actually download/own the material, half the time I don't even download what I buy anyways, since even if I did I would inevitable just continue to stream it instead anyways. :P
Yeah, I never signed up for Apple Music (or any of Apple's cloud services) so I didn't go through that. I just use iTunes to manage MP3's stored locally. As soon as Amazon started selling MP3's, there wasn't any reason to buy from Apple anymore. (Not that I did that much; usually I would buy CD's and rip them under the theory that the CD serves as a backup, and to avoid Apple's copy protection when that was still a thing.)
I did try uploading all my music to Google's music service as an extra backup and for mobile use, and it sorta worked, but the syncing isn't very smooth and it's more hassle than Spotify.
Spotify (along with Bandcamp and Youtube), are my go-to services for listening to music these days too. They are all just so damn convenient to use, and between them all have pretty much everything available that I want to listen to, so I don't really see the point in maintaining a local library of music anymore. Even back in the day when I did manage my own local library of music files through iTunes, I kinda hated doing it, since I often found myself spending more time collecting and organizing it all than I did actually listening to it... so as soon as streaming became more reliable/legitimate that quickly lost all appeal to me.
p.s. A few days ago I actually did some spring cleaning and got rid of most of my physical media. I had several hundred CDs and DVDs each, but when sorting through them realized it had been years since I actually listened to or watched any of them, so what was the point in me keeping them? I held on to a handful that are collectors items, rare, and/or cannot be found on any streaming services, but other than those, the rest will go to the local charity shop once the lockdown is over. I think I'm pretty much done with physical media at this point, since it just causes needless clutter that I am better off without.
I took a look, and they seem to be missing major genres like classical and Weird Al. :-)
YouTube and Spotify seemingly have everything. They don't, really, but it's close enough to sustain the illusion.
I got to be honest... I was drunk when writing that... o.O
I mean I love bandcamp but... ehm yeah...