Buying digital music
Paulo Coelho Alves in The state of digital music purchases in 2024 (Or: how I tried and failed to buy Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports):
It flies in the face of how most media is consumed today. People have become used to renting, rather than owning, their movies, TV shows, music and videogames. Ownership of digital media usually comes with many caveats, with DRM being the norm, and ownership only lasting as long as the platform to which is tied exists. The only real ownership comes in two ways: physical media, or, digital media without DRM.
Stumbling across this post yesterday was eerie: A year after Paulo published it, I went through the exact same journey trying to buy a lossless digital version of the same exact same album by Brian Eno.
Nothing has changed in the year that passed. I was unable to accomplish the task. Which left me with the following options, as outlined by Paulo:
At this point, my options have basically been reduced to5:
- buying the album on CD, plus a CD drive, and ripping it
- ripping the album from YouTube using a tool like yt-dlp
- jumping on P2P and grabbing one of the many lossless versions floating out there
I opted for a combination of 1 (only I bought the vinyl) and 3. A month later, I'm still waiting for the record to arrive, but in the meantime I've been enjoying my lossless digital copy of the album immensely.