What’s The Best Way To Get Music? (Tech Thursday) [Tech Rest]
I love what RADIOHEAD has done with their latest release: pay us what you want to pay (even if that means free!).
That seems to give me what I want: the artists make a reasonable profit and I get music that is free from any copy protection.
I think that’s what most of us want. Sure, I know people that have thousands of songs and haven’t paid for any of them. At the other extreme, I imagine there’s at least one person on the planet that believes the record industry should continue to put copy protection on music and keep most of the profits.
I think RADIOHEAD represents the future but not everything is available that way now. So what’s the best alternative?
BitTorrent. The obvious advantage is that it’s free ad you can get anything. What bothers me is that in this case the artists usually don’t get money from it. I say usually because the artists can make money from concerts and merchandising is we don’t pay for their downloads. And, it’s a violation of copyright law and the RIAA has been known to go after people for this.
iTunes. I like iTunes because of the great store experience. I don’t like it because it’s hard to move songs from machine to machine and at least most of the music is copy protected. If iTunes offered mp3’s without DRM, that’s probably the way I would go.
Amazon.com. You should know that I am an Amazon.com Associate. This means that I earn a little bit when you buy something through Amazon links or my Amazon.com aStore. That being said it looks like to me that Amazon is heading in the right direction. If I were buying The Very Best Of Spyro Gyra today, I would buy it from Amazon. Why? 256 kbps, MP3 file. What’s that mean. It means that for the same price I would pay at iTunes, I get music the way I want it: high quality (256 kbps), best format (MP3), and without copy protection!
So, back to you: what’s your favorite way to get music?
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Original post here: Craig Huggart
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