Robster Wrote: > Spending £12.99 or more for a CD in Virgin or HMV is criminal in my > opinion. It actually really annoys me what they charge. > > Anyhow I use Play or CDWow for fairly priced albums but I also use All > of MP3 for most of my stuff now. Quality is great, the choices are > excellent for me, downloads are fairly speedy, you can listen to the > whole album before buying and anything I cannot find I buy a CD. > > As long as the site is still trading I will use it. It has cut my > expenditure big time, I used to buy 2-3 albums a week, now I can get > say 10 for the same money. Whether it's legit or unethical I don't > know but it's a damn good deal. > R allofmp3 has greatly reduced my contribution to the music biz coke mountain; but more from encouraging some healthy quality control than anything else.
I'll admit it: I used to be a CD-holic. At the peak of my habit, I was averaging out at more than one CD a day, for several years. In the UK, that's a lot of money. Far too many were bought just because someone else had said they were good, got played once, and then went into the archive. A couple of years ago, just to make some room in the house, I went through my archive, and singled out for disposal all those discs that I *knew* I was never bothered about hearing again. It worked out at about 10% of my collection (and I was *extremely* conservative). A significant proportion of those were CDs that had been superceded by subsequent "definitive" remasters - and some of those had been superceded themselves. (Did I get a trade-in on those? Did I f... For the most part, the music industry's definition of "customer loyalty" seems to be, "We wallop them on the head with a stick but they keep coming back".) Nowadays, I'm much more choosy, and have a strong preference to try before I buy. And that's where places like allofmp3.com come in. I can listen to a whole album (albeit in mono) for free - not just pathetic 30-second introductions. (This means I can listen to a whole load of things that I'd always wondered about, but had never quite got round to listening to, and so it's actually broadening my horizons; though admittedly, by-and-large this just means I have a long list of bookmarks to things that I might listen to sometime, but haven't got round to yet.) If I decide it's worth further investigation, I can download a good-quality version for a pittance, and try it out for a while. If I decide it's good enough to keep, and that the artist deserves my support, then I'll buy the CD (usually online - record shops are no longer the little Meccas that they once were to me). If I can find it, that is: there are things on allofmp3.com that I'd have real trouble sourcing otherwise, e.g. Polish artists, or artists whose albums have long been deleted (such is the record company's fervour to make more money out of them). Unlike iTunes etc., I don't have to pay a premium just because I live in the UK. And no bloomin' DRM crap either. As with almost every online download site I've seen (yes, I'm thinking of iTunes here in particular), you have to use your head. Is that the latest remaster of the album, or one of those early-CD-era versions seemingly made from a half-chewed cassette tape found under the pile of Rizlas in the glove compartment of some A&R man's BMW? Usually, it's impossible to be sure (even with the mono samples). I was delighted to find an album that has only ever been released on CD in Japan, only to discover that it had clearly been copied from a less-than-perfect LP. So that was a waste of $1.20. I felt so much more cheated than when I paid UKP 12.99 for that CD of a half-chewed cassette tape :-) Oh, and it was allofmp3.com's habit of setting the URL tag in WMA files to "allofmp3.com" that gave me trouble with SlimServer 6.2.1, just after I'd ordered my SB3... ! (Yes, I'm usually too lazy to re-rip the kosher copy.) (And so we preserve some sort of tenuous link between this article and the forum topic!) In a world where the music industry is trying to piggy-back on panic-response anti-terrorist legislation to crack down on music sharing, it's astonishing that allofmp3.com and its ilk exists. I still worry that one day the Recording Industry Ass of America (to give it its proper name) will persuade allofmp3.com to part with its customer records and come chasing after me, even though it's none of their damn business. But since when has that stopped any US administration from doing what it wants to the rest of the world? :-) -- Brian P.S. Hmm, reading over this again, I feel duty-bound to point out that I don't really think the music industry is so entirely jaded and washed-out as my comments above might imply. For example, I do recognise that improvements in technology mean that earlier CD releases can be bettered; and there are some excellent examples of budget-price remasters (e.g. the Rhino Yes series). And there are numerous labels (such as ECM and Hyperion) where what they do is clearly a labour of love. P.P.S. At the risk of sounding totally sucky, another big reason for a dropoff in my CD purchases has been the introduction of jukeboxes (of which the SB3 is the latest); simply, I'm enjoying rediscovering the music I already have so much that I have less time for investigating new things! -- Brian Ritchie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brian Ritchie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2319 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18642 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
