Buying music online used to be easy. Either you bought from Itunes, who had the biggest catalog or EMusic who were the only major selling mp3s. The frontier is changing now and I thought I would put up some thoughts and tips for shopping online for music. For the purposes of this I will be looking at an album I wanted to pick up, Cthulhu Strikes Back by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets my favorite quirky band of the moment. They are obscure, but not too obscure and can be found on most of the popular sites.

First up the Itunes store has this album and three other The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets albums. Thats the good news, the bad news is they are only availble as classic Itunes store downloads, which means they DRMed heavily and in the odd aac format that Apple uses to keep others from selling DRMed music that works on the iPod. Price is $10, not bad but it would cost more if it were available DRM free as Apple charges a premium for removing the DRM when the record company lets them.

Next up Emusic. They have the album as well but you can’t just buy it, you have to subscribe to one of their monthly plans to get it. The album has fifteen tracks which means that it will take about half your monthly plan if you have the smallest Emusic monthly plan, thirty tracks every month for $10. This makes Emusic the cheapest place to get the album at $5. It is DRM free mp3 files which will work on any music player including the iPod. However after buying this one you still have fifteen downloads left for the month, finding an album with exactly fifteen tracks to make it even for the month can be a challenge. If you find one with eighteen track album then you have to buy a top up, which come in units of ten, leaving you looking for a seven song album and so on and so on. I gave up on Emusic, I am a simple animal and it all got to complicated for me.

CDBaby was a favorite for me, they stock almost all independents and are now offering most music as downloads as well physical CDs. They have the album and a full set of Thickets albums and are the ones the Thickets point you to from their own site. I am annoyed with them however as the download price is no cheaper than getting a CD. I want the music immediately, that is why I download normally, but I feel like a sap if I could have gotten the actual CD in my hand for the same price. In addition they aren’t cheap, at $13 they are the most expensive of any of the download services although they do give you a nice high quality DRM free mp3 when you buy from them.

Last up is Amazon. Amazon has the album and the other three from the Thickets at a decent price of $9 each. They come as DRM free mp3 files but Amazon has its own oddity in its download manager which is the only way to get music you buy from them. It is actually a handy tool as it loads the songs into your Itunes library after downloading them (which normally you have to do manually if you buy from someone other than the Itunes store) but it does have some quirky behavior, like not downloading unless it is the latest version, then forgetting what you were going to download if you upgrade the bugger. Amazon also has some odd terms of use when they sell you music which basically say you are licensing the music from them, not buying it like when you buy a CD.

So there is no perfect answer, each store has some annoying stuff but for this one I picked it up at Amazon. The price was good, it is DRM free and while annoying their terms of use and download tool can be ignored once I have the music on my PC. Amazon isn’t always the winner though, I am not kidding when I say we are in a wild west period for music downloads, I check around before buying any music online. In my next post I will go over some of the other choices out there for online shopping that muddy the water even more.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Copyright, Internet, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.