Friday, April 10, 2009

The Lossless Music Store


The CD is dead. It's a redundant medium with a better option on both the analog and digital worlds. The CD brought digital music to the masses, but with the internet and huge iTunes libraries, who cares now about the little plastic case and the small disc in it?

I love my vinyls for their large covers and the feeling of preciousness they give to the music. But this blog won't be about vinyls. Because for every vinyl I buy I want its digital copy.

This blog will cover the online legal availability of lossless music. It's a place far from perfection. The record labels are greedy, there is many formats and certainly no "on
e place to shop". I will obviously not try to find a new business model for the record labels. But I will give hints to available lossless music, online store reviews (if they exists), software, components (hardware) and any other reason to post something in here once in a while!

But what's wrong anyway?

Quality

So I want my music in a lossless format. Lossless means you lose nothing. I want to choose myself how I will use this digital copy. I'm listening music on my main system? I need lossless. I want to copy it on my iPhone? 256kps or 320kps please.

The current offer is very thin in this regard.

Most indie record labels offers a voucher to download a mp3 copy for their vinyl albums. Most large record companies have no vouchers. The iTunes store and Amazon sell music at 256kps.

With the rapid growth of storage and relative cheapness, along with fast internet access, there's no needs for compressed music.

Cost

iTunes sells sub-CD quality songs for 0.99$ (and now for as much as 1.29$). That's 10 to 12$ per albums. A product where there is now no physical item to produce, no inventory to maintain, no sell figures to estimate how many CDs to produce and no shipping. Don't you have the feeling of being ripped off? I'm sure it's not the artists who get all the extra money.

Availability

Where can I buy my lossless copy of the new Bod Dylan album? ........ nowhere that
's where.

Piracy
You can download it though! And probably before its release date too.

I pirate music. I mentioned that I buy vinyl albums. I currently
don't have a choice, if I want a lossless digital copy, of an album I already bought, I need to go for the torrents.

Other industries

Every problem faced by the lossless music seeker also exists in the film and television industries. Price, quality, availability, sinking business model...

In this blog, I will concentrate of what i love the most: music.

Out to go listen to the new Decemberists album!

14 comments:

  1. I completely agree on the whole piracy concept. I myself have a rather large Vinyl collection which I still adore but on my new sound system I want crisp music without the crackling to boot.

    The only viable option is to either purchase the cd (at a substantial cost) or pirate the music for free.

    On my connection, 11Mbps (1.2MB/s) I can download an entire album in lossless in under 10 minutes, far quicker than driving to a walmart to spending 25 bucks on a single album.

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  2. i also agree what you said about piracy. legally wrong, but morally legit.

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  3. The difficulty of getting lossless legally is why I still buy CDs, which anyway are often cheaper online than an entire album from itunes (as you say) (eg cdwow.com)

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  4. Where do you think those Lossless torrents come from?

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  5. You can find a long list of sites that offer lossless music in FLAC format at http://www.flacatac.com/music/

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  6. I think you will find only FLAC and WAV are trully loss-less 320Kb/s MP3 are not

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  7. Lossless torrents, usually FLAC files, come from CDs. Yes, CDs are outdated, but that is where the torrents come from. Very rarely do they come directly from the studio.

    I do agree that there should be a major store online to buy lossless rips directly from the studio, but usually it's still too expensive. It's ridiculous to buy a CD (or rip of an album) for anything above $10.

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  8. Hi,
    I've found a store, that sells flac and wav files:

    http://musicishere.com/

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  9. http://www.murfie.com

    has an interesting business model on buy/sell/trade and you can download in multiple different formats including flac and apple lossless

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  10. You almost had me happy there.. I thought I found a store!

    I have a massive CD collection but I am now living in a different country so bringing them all is too expensive I put them all onto my pc in losless format, now I sit with an issue to try and buy new music as I can't get losless without buying the CD!

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  11. Vist this blog to download free FLAC albums

    http://fresharchive.net

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  12. by by miss american pie............................

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  13. your an idiot. 256 and 320 are not lossless. lossless is more like 900-1000 kbps, dont believe me then rip a some of the dead media you were talking about using WAV or ALAC

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    Replies
    1. Read again, check your head.

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