I may be duplicating some earlier poll, but a search didn’t come up with one.
So, I’d like to know more about how you get your music. One choice is that you get your music through “other means” – I meant that as a tongue in cheek reference to piracy, but you can also take that to mean “Boyo Jim you idiot, you forgot about ___”, and let me know what you’re filling in the blank with, if you can do so without incriminating yourself. 
Pre-digital music age I had an extensive and mountainous collection of CDs (many of which were replacements for cassettes), and the bulk of my digital music collection is comprised of those ripped CDs.
Once I had a Mac, an iPod, and iTunes the purchasing of CDs, after a bit of resistance, stopped altogether fairly quickly and I at first bought a lot of whole albums online but once I had filled out my collection with music I had wanted but for whatever reason could not previously acquire on CD or cassette (either it was unavailable or I didn’t have the money), I’ve cherry-picked songs individually for the last section of my music-buying period, which has for the most part ended.
If you’re asking about “other means”, you probably shouldn’t have made this a public poll.
You can answer that ‘yes’ to the question without incriminating yourself. If you explain in your post that you pirate music, making it a private poll won’t make any difference.
Well, I buy all of my music online, but some of it is on CDs bought from Amazon. For a lot of classical music, the CD is often the same price or even less expensive that the digital download. For pop music, I always buy the digital download, usually during Amazon’s $5 downloads or their daily specials.
Sounds interesting… what are these?
Yeah, I interpreted “buying online” to refer to how I receive the music (digitally through the internet vs. physically through the mail) rather than how I place the order.
I almost always buy used CDs, then rip them to my computer. On those rare occasions when I download an album on-line, I always burn it to CD and stick it in my collection. It just feels “safer” somehow. I don’t feel like I own it unless I have a physical copy.
I should add that Amazon sometimes has “Free mp3 song of the day” in their mp3 store. I frequently download those, if I have any interest in the song or artist, but this is hardly the bulk of my collection.
Since Pandora came out, I rarely buy music anymore. I much prefer having it choose what I listen to than having to laboriously go through my collection and choose which exact artist/song to play. I’m not much of a music person; I pretty much just want something in the background to listen to while socializing, and Pandora is great for that.
The option “I but most or all of my music online” is poorly worded.
I buy a lot of music, in the form of CDs, from amazon.com, so I’m buying my music online. I suspect that what you meant with this option tho is “I buy my music in download form rather than any hardcopy”.
To clarify: I only buy CDs. I do not buy downloads of music.
I buy most of my music by the song on I-tunes. But, I will also buy the CD if I like all or even most of the songs on it. It’s nice when I figure out that I like the whole CD before I’ve spent too much on individual purchases, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
If you’re interested in why people buy by the song or by the album, for me, the biggest (though not the only) reason is this:
Throughout my life, I have found many, many songs that I love, or at least like quite a bit, that I never would have heard if I had not bought the album they appear on.
If I like a song well enough to purchase it, I’m going to want to see if there’s “more where that came from.”
I buy a majority of my music on physical formats, but I also (legally) download a fairly significant amount. I also chose “other means” because you forgot cassettes. 