I have a serious aversion to buying music; I’ll readily admit that I get the vast majority of my music from the Internet (without paying, obviously). Over the past few weeks, that’s changed considerably.
Part of the reason is that I’m at home and it takes longer to download high quality mp3s. Also, with the demise of Audiogalaxy, I’m finding it a lot more difficult to find good mp3s in the first place. Another reason is that I’ve finally realised that it’s quite nice to have all of the songs from one album, especially since it looks better on my iPod.
I’m not buying my CDs from stores, online or offline – I still think it’s too expensive. I’m not prepared to pay any more than £10 for an album, and even then I’d have to really want it. However, on eBay and Amazon Marketplace (basically a more organized version of eBay) I can find albums that fall within the £3 to £7 range. The upshot of it all is that I’m paying about 20 to 35p per track, which seems like a perfectly reasonable amount.
I also get to keep the CD, from which I can rip at whatever quality I want. Plus, it’s all completely legal. The point of this little story is that until online mp3 stores (e.g. Pressplay) can offer a better deal on price or convenience terms, I can’t see any reason to use them. Right now they’re all too expensive, they have limited libraries, the music you download is often protected and you obviously don’t get to keep the CD*. So they’ll have to do a lot of work to persuade me to hand over my cash.
(All of this only applies to people like me though – you probably couldn’t get the latest music via Amazon Marketplace or eBay for at least a month. But I don’t want the latest music, so it’s okay.)
*I’m not that bothered about this, but I am bothered about being able to convert my music into whatever formats I want.
mssv 