Three Reasons Why I Still Do Not Purchase Digital Music Online (2007-03-09)

2007-03-09 00:00

Three Reasons Why I Still Do Not Purchase Digital Music Online

In today's world of easily accessible, legal, and user friendly digital music, why do I find myself still purchasing all of my music in CD format? I've never been someone who identifies myself by the music I listen to, and I am not a fanatical fan of any of my favorite artists, but I do find that when purchasing music I enjoy exploring beyond the hit single. If I like the "radio" sound of a new band - I am usually curious about more than just what I hear on the radio, and buying the entire album gives me a chance to hear more. Of course, entire albums are available for purchase in the digital music world too, but I still find some sort of satisfaction in having a physical object, including album art and other extras, that says, "you purchased some music." It may be strange that I care at all about the actual disk, especially since it is usually stuffed in a box and forgotten once the music is ported to the computer, but there seems to be some added value in actually having a disk, even if it is only perception. Despite this psychological satisfaction, I have concluded that in my future purchases I could wean myself away from the need for a CD - so what else is keeping my music from going pure digital?

Digital music is not CD quality - despite relatively good quality encoding from the online retailers, they still don't match the bitrate level to which I rip all of my CDs. CDs give me the chance to decide what level of quality I find acceptable in my mp3s, and the possibility in the future to go back and re-encode anything I am not happy with - digital song downloads only offer one level of encoding, which is optimized for speed of download more than quality of sound. Even with somewhat compromised sound quality, I might be able to convince myself to purchase music online, but there is one final problem that I cannot overlook, digital rights management.

Despite somewhat liberal DRM policies, I still cannot get past the fact that once I have "purchased" music from a digital music retailer there are limitation in what I can do with it. I understand the reasoning behind this approach to digital sales, but when an avenue as appealing as buying a CD and managing my own digitizing offers no restrictions, I cannot possibly let my music get caught up in DRM problems instead. One site I recently stumbled upon looks promising, and I will keep an eye on it, http://www.amiestreet.com/. Amie St offers the user DRM-free music, with prices based on popularity. While I'm sure it's not the only site in existence without DRM, I do like it's unique setup, and it seems to be building a good customer base, as well as some bigger name artists who are willing to sell their music without DRM. Hopefully we as picky consumers will find that the next revolution in digital music puts sites like Amie St in the spotlight, and DRM-free music on our hard drives.

- Kevin
Kevin (at) Upcsite (dot) Net

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