I still do both, and have only been downloading in bulk for the past year or so. In that time I have been doing about 50/50 between downloads and CDs. I refuse to buy anything with DRM on it and usually buy from Amazon or emusic where the bit rates are higher. I love having the the liner notes and the actual CD for the sound quality and backup reasons, but when I can download for about half the price (or less in some cases) and a lot of the liner note info is on-line anyway, it seems to be a waste of money.
The CDs I buy are mostly used or when the music club has the super cut rate/ no shipping cost sale and I stock up. Every year I do end up buying a few full price CDs for those bands I really like and can’t find on-line, or when I get a gift card.
Oh, as for protecting my investment - some of my downloads I have burned onto CDs for using in the car, but since I have my entire library on my I-Pod and I also back up my computer onto a spare hard drive every few weeks I think I am pretty set as far as that goes.
Okay, now I’m curious: how much do you typically pay for a CD? I’m not sure what the “average” price for a CD is nowadays, but out of curiosity I checked Amazon.com’s page of “hot new releases” and I see they’re offering most of them at $9.99 each.
Magnatune sells their music as MP3s, OGGs, and also uncompressed WAVs perfect for burning to a CD. When you buy an album, you get 30 days of access to all the files for that album, so you can download it in multiple formats. (Looking at their website, they seem to be emphasising licensing rather than album sales, but that’s more a matter of terminology these days.)
Let’s say I can get the 12-song CD for $12. I can download the two or three songs that have gotten airplay for $1 each. That means if I buy the CD, I’m paying the same amount for the worst song on the album as I am paying for the best song.
If I knew an artist or band’s songs were of consistent quality throughout the disc, that would be reasonable. But over the past several years, my experience has been that that’s the exception. There might be one or two additional songs on the album that I consider worth repeated listening, but it makes no sense to pay $9-$10 for those one or two songs.
When the price of a CD drops to about $6, I’ll start buying CDs again, because $3-$4 is a reasonable price for the gamble on the 9-10 tracks that didn’t get airplay, plus the album art and stuff. $10 isn’t.
I figure that if I got into the downloading I would use that more than CDs. But for whatever reason, I grew up purchasing CDs that I wanted and it’s really hard to let a habit go. Even though I have an iPod and iTunes…I basically just transfer the songs from CDs to digital media and put them on my iPod instead.
I only buy CD’s. I would never pay to download music unless that was the only way I could get it. Not a fan of free downloads either, except for sampling. Most of the music I listen to is non mainstream bands with smaller audiences and I like to help support them so they can continue making music.
I like the artwork, photos, lyrics, etc that come with a cd. Yes you can view a lot of this online but it’s not the same. I also like having a physical object that the music is stored on and the higher quality sound of a cd. I do rip cd’s as soon as I get them though (160 kps), and transfer them to my portable music player. I have my entire mp3 collection backed up on dvds.
I’m a CD Buyer through and through. Here’s a list of reasons why:
I get mine at around $11-12 per CD, free shipping, in about 3 days from where I order.
I like having the physical disc, the artwork, the lyrics, and all that. It’s a good collectable.
Most of the music I listen to is obscure bands, so I like supporting them; I’ll ALWAYS buy a CD at a concert if it’s an option, even if it’s more expensive, because more of the money goes directly to the band
The sound quality is better, and I have a physical copy incase anything happens to my harddrive, MP3 player, or what have you.
If it happens to be a band for which I’m buying a CD for just a couple songs, I often find songs I like just as much or more elsewhere on the album
The pluses for MP3s are much less:
It’s cheaper
I only get songs that I like
As for the first plus for MP3s… big deal, art and music shouldn’t be about cost effectiveness, they’re about so much more. Hell, there’s several CDs in my collection I paid more than $30 for because they are that rare, and I already had most of the songs in MP3, but the songs I didn’t have, and the physical, tangible copy were still worth every cent.
As for 2, it’s as much a draw back too, since you will also miss out on songs you may have liked but didn’t hear. For instance, one in somewhat recent memory was Opeth’s last album, in which Grand Conjuration was the marketted song. I figure it was chosen because it was the most marketable, and it’s a decent song, but probably one of .my least favorite on the album.
It’s cheap (my rates are grandfathered in, so I’m paying $10US for 40 downloads each month), the selection is just fine for my needs (since my tastes lean towards the indie and obscure, which incidentally, are NEVER on the $9.99 rack at HMV), and they’re often spot-on when it comes to recommending interesting stuff based on previous downloads (something that rarely, if ever, has happened to me in a brick and mortar store).
I last bought a CD maybe three years ago or so, and that’s just because I had decided on a whim buy the Limited Edition Dolby 5.1 version of Beck’s last album with a gift certificate I’d gotten (which otherwise probably would’ve gathered dust until it was no longer any good).
I’ll generally download, unless it’s my favorite band or something, and I’ll want something physical to hold on to. Also, being in the same town as Amoeba means that CDs tend to run cheaper, so if I have the time, I’ll check there first.
CDs, exclusively. I have lots from before there were ever MP3s. My MP3 player has songs on shuffle, good for walking the dog, but I have real CDs in my car. Much easier to select and sort through while driving. My old car stereo didn’t have a player input, though my new one does.
Plus, before it left, I was just. blocks away from a Rasputin where I could buy used CDs for $4 - $8. The only stuff on MP3 exclusively is classical music I borrow from the library and rip.
I don’t listen to a lot of new music, but for the most part I enjoy the songs that don’t get a lot of airplay the best.
Another one for CDs. Main reason is for the CD booklet. If iTunes offered a .PDF booklet with liner notes for every album I probably would switch to downloads.
I still buy albums because the hit song on an album is , most of the time, not the one that I think is the best. I’ll usually only buy an album from an artist if I think that there is a chance that the whole album is worth listening to.
I hate CDs. I never buy them anymore, unless I want an album that isn’t available in digital format. For a while I thought I’d start buying CDs of albums that I really liked, but then I thought, “What would I do with them?” I don’t want to put them on display somewhere for anyone to go through–I’m weirdly private about the music I listen to and don’t want people asking me about it. I’d never actually listen to the CDs–I prefer to listen to music on something I can carry around with me, and a bulky portable CD player isn’t going to work. If I’m curious about lyrics I can look them up online. Album art is cool–for about 5 seconds, then I don’t care about it anymore.
So yeah, I own maybe 4 CDs of music that I currently like. They’re stuffed in a box in a closet somewhere. I put the music on my computer and forgot about them. I buy digital music all the time, and I keep meaning to burn it to CD in case my computer blows up or something, but haven’t done it yet. Seems like too much effort.
That reminds me, the last album I bought was Nine Inch Nails “Year Zero”, because it had that cool CD that was totally black but would reveal a different label with coded messages when heated up. I had to support that kind of creativity. Never actually listened to the CD, just ripped it and put it on the shelf.
Album art used to be cool on vinyl, on cassettes it was terrible, CDs only a bit better. I’m just into the music now.
Just an update. The mp3 album for Nerf Herder IV was released today on Amazon.com, so I went ahead and downloaded it. I must say I am amazed and satisfied at how it went. Amazed because of the ease. I bought it with One Click, and the download started immediately. I had oreviously installed the downloader and had purchased single songs, but that was on dialup, so those used to take an agonizingly long time. But this was my first time using broadband to download. I had the entire album in about 5 minutes. It cost $9.49, about four-fifty less than the actual CD. And it was better than CD quality, at 256 kbps. DRM-free, so I had zero trouble transferring it to my Creative Zen player and also burned a CD so that I had a physical backup. AFAIAC, downloading is the way for me to go from now on.
Thanks, this thread disappeared for awhile and I was looking for your link. I didn’t know WAV was the same as PCM.
I tried to look at an audio CD on my laptop and it wouldn’t show me the file extensions.
I’ll have to experiment but I can easily hear the difference at 128bps. Often sound is added where it wasn’t before. I can also hear the difference between 2 CD players on a good home system. Not all players are equal and not all ripping software is equal. At home my goal is to get as much out of my equipment. In the car there is too much noise to worry about it. It’s nice to plug a memory stick into my car radio and play music but I will always want a master disk with the best possible recording.
Not sure how the licensing works but I want unfettered access to my music.
I love CDs and constantly buy them, they’re my biggest vice.
I love the album art, and (before the internets was huge), i loved it when they came with lyrics or messages (Like the Root’s albums- which have their drummer’s commentary on the making of each song or the ideas/“behind the scenes” details for each song in the notes). I love the tangible things like that.
I also try to buy my CDs cheap, and prefer it where I do get a 15 songs for less than 15 bucks sorta deal. But I also like Rap CDs, and the ones in the 90’s came with TONS of skits and such in them. I “feel” better about having a complete album like “The Chronic” or “Doggystyle” and paying for an album, vs. having to pay 99cents or whatever it is just to end up downloading a 45 second long track that was just a silly skit.
I also love the feeling of listening to an album, and discovering it has a Hidden track on it or an unnamed song from the back.
That’s one of my little joys in life- discovering a hidden track on a CD. It’s a total Squee! moment for me.
