I am not that old, really. But I am still buying CDs. I listen to slacker or Pandora, sometimes spotify. When I hear music I like, I buy the CD… usually works well. I am kinda tired of it though, I would rather just buy the songs and download them. The problem is that I don’t want the damn aps that it looks like amazon, Google and apple want me to use. I just want the damn mp3 that I can play on my phone, tablet, computer, wife’s computer, whatever without having to use some digital rights management software. I am willing, as a sorta rich old white guy, to pay a premium for this right… where can I get it?
Bonus: true, if boring, story. The day I decided to never ever stop buying CDs was the day I first used iTunes. I take all my CDs and rip them to my windows computer and then put copies on my phone and tablet and sometimes on my wife or daughters devices of choice. I believe I am justified to do this in the same way that I could make my wife mix tapes back in the day, correct me if i am wrong (not that I will care). Anyway, my wife wanted some music on her iPhone, no problem I thought. I plugged in her phone and started the process and her phone started erasing all my music as it transferred the limited amount I was giving her to her phone. It was transferring all my stuff to the cloud and enforcing a single instance rule for the music. Screw that, I did not sign up for that… no aps, no digital rights management, no thanks. I buy the music, it is mine, I won’t resell it, but if i want my wife to listen to a song that i have on my phone without erasing it from my phone then I am going to do that and they can try to sue me…
Get off my lawn!!! (Am I as old and naive as I think I am?)
If you still want to buy some cds, Amazon has this new thing where if you buy the cd through them they’ll also give you the mp3.
I buy my music through Amazon. I do this because I usually have a coupon for them. Plus, it’ll automatically download to my iTunes, which then causes Google Play to automatically upload them to their music cloud.
Yep. I drag and drop mine onto my phone, no problem. Also Amazon keeps a copy of what you’ve bought in the cloud so you can play it from there as well. Nice backup too since I’ve lost music to hard drive crashes before. (I now backup myself as well.)
The last time I paid attention to such matters, they required you to install their downloader if you were buying a whole album but not if you were buying an individual song. This may well have changed since then; but they have enough free songs available that it’d be easy enough to test.
Google allows you to dump anything you have on Google Play as a straight, non-DRM .mp3 file on your computer. Even the hundred or so freebie starter songs can be downloaded as .mp3’s for you to put on your iPod or phone or whatever.
You will want to use the Google Play application to dump the songs since it limits the number of times you can download a song directly but will allow you to download your Google Play library (or just new, non-previously downloaded tracks) as many times as you want. Don’t ask me why that restriction exists.
This was my experience as well. I bought plenty of single songs, and just downloaded them like any other file. Then I bought a whole album and had to install their cockamamie downloading app. After that, even buying single songs, they go through the app. Pain in the arse.
Depending on what sort of stuff you’re after, the artist or band may have a website you can download directly from. This has the added advantage of the money you pay actually going to the artists, not to middlemen.
Another suggestion for Amazon. The downloader is a bit of a pain, but it’s no worse than iTunes. Plus you know you get plain simple MP3s, often for very good prices. I’ve gotten quite a few albums for $5.
By the way, (for the OP), no one puts DRM on their music anymore. You download the file, it’s yours to do with as you wish within reason. This includes iTunes.
Also, Amazon and Google have apps for iPhone and Android that let you download music from their clouds directly onto your phone without having to use a computer.