Napster vanquished.

[sonickteam2]

Originally posted by bellenseb:
  I've heard good things about R&TT, but I've never been to one. What's the closest one to DC? Any chance of a DC/VA location?

none in DC yet.  all in the Bmore area. Severna Park or Annapolis are the closest to DC.

[chaz]

Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
   
 
 personally i still think .99 a track is to high and avoid itunes, etc like the plaque.

Yeah, I agree that .99 a song is too much, but I don't think $10 per album is too bad, esp. when I feel like making an impulse buy.  I just got tired of f***ing with kazaa and the like, getting songs with less than stellar audio quality, having to constantly fix up the id3 tags etc.

[markie]

I like to physically own the CD. I think that makes me a dinosaur.
 
 but for people who are not, I think itunes store is pretty cool. It makes a lot of sense. Being able to get individual tracks for 99 cents is great. It is much better than having to hunt down some rare overpriced CD single, or get an album you do not really want.

[kosmo vinyl]

i'm with markie on this one...  i would never spend $10 to buy impulsevily buy the electronic version of an album.  for that much money i want the physical product.  
 
 emusic is still best us based mp3 provider.  for a $3.33 I can get a 15 track album.  the problem is those bastards keep adding great new music and 90 tracks a month only go so far.
 
 if you are willing to dip your toe in the legalities of russian copywrite law, allofmp3 is one way to go. instead of paying per song you pay per megabyte downloaded.  and you can get songs in a wide variety of formats and compression levels.  
 
 emusic is tied to the per track restriction because songwriters get paid the same regardless of if the track one minute or nine minutes long.
 
 personally, i would like to see a music library scenario.  where i can checkout the entire record listen to it for a week and decide whether not i want to keep it.  and be given the option to buy the physical product at the end of the loan period.

[Guiny]

Originally posted by mark e smith:
  I like to physically own the CD.

I couldnt agree with you more.....and wont from now on. But i do have to have the cd.

[chaz]

Originally posted by Rob_Gee_a.k.a _Guiny:
   

Originally posted by mark e smith:
  I like to physically own the CD.

I couldnt agree with you more.....and wont from now on. But i do have to have the cd. [/b]

For me it depends really.  Sometimes I don't really care about the physical product.  To date I've bought 5 albums off of itunes.  All of them so far have been new releases by new bands.  I guess that when it's a band I've listened to a while and have some sort of emotional attachment to I'm more likely to want the physical product.  I dunno.  
 
 Also, probably 80% of the music I listen to is via the ipod, whether at home, in the car or whatever, and since i've gotten strung out on that thing the physical cd's just seem less important than they used to.

[redsock]

See, I fall smack dab in the middle. I used to think owning the CD was a must, but recently, with all the burned copies of things floating through my life, I couldn't care less. In truth, if it is a CD I really want, I'll buy the real deal somewhere. Otherwise, i'll try new music, or fill in my back catalog stuff on burned CDs all day. Though, it does make my CD collection look less impressive. and isn't that what its all about anyway?
 
 I swore I'd never pay for music over the net. But I did just purchase the sigur ros ep. $3.00 for an ep makes itunes worthwhile. And I agree with Markie, to find a hard to get single, it makes sense. And an album for $10 is still cheaper that anything this side of a used CD. I just don't care about the booklets, they are often lame anyway.

[kosmo vinyl]

i was spoiled by the formerly "unlimited" download policy of emusic, so my sense of what the cost of an electronic version of an album is skewed.
 
 personally, i feel insulted by being charged for $10 for downloading a album, given the fact that for not much more i can get the physical product.  but if the download cost half as much as the cd, it would be more attractive.
 
 secret machines have an interesting offer at the moment... for 8.91 you can download their new cd, which isn't due out for awhile, they'll also send you a six song sampler of other bands and a custom cdr to burn the cd to.  is the wave of the future?

[bellenseb]

The stuff I download tends to be live shows, demos, and other commercially unreleased stuff. I also download a fair amount of rare singles and import bonus tracks. That was always a huge gyp for the American music fan, shelling out 12 bucks for one extra track on an import single or 35 for one extra track on a japanese import, and I have no remorse about downloading those tracks for free.
 
 However, I feel bad downloading whole albums and I still love buying a physical CD. The handful of times I've DLed whole albums have been when one of my favorite artists' new albums surfaced before the record was released. But every time I felt guilty and bought the physical copy when it came out.

[ratioci nation]

Originally posted by bellenseb:
 That was always a huge gyp for the American music fan

uk artists often put extra tracks on their us releases, so it all evens out

[markie]

Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
  i was spoiled by the formerly "unlimited" download policy of emusic, so my sense of what the cost of an electronic version of an album is skewed.
 
 

But emusic had to change because it was not viable.
 
 It was good in some ways and terrible in others. Concentrating on the bad.....It was never going to be more than a niche service because it never had "top 50 artists" on it. Plus I have several albums missing tracks that I tried downloading 5 times or more.
 
 We have had this debate so many times.....
 
 
 iTunes overcomes those 3 flaws, but is more expensive. You get what you pay for.

[markie]

Originally posted by pollard:
   

Originally posted by bellenseb:
 That was always a huge gyp for the American music fan

uk artists often put extra tracks on their us releases, so it all evens out [/b]

But that is a double con, as if you're in the UK you have to buy the US version of the album, also, to get the extra tracks. If you are in the US, and a fan, you will have bought the album on import already.
 
 Either way a fan ends up with two copies of the album.

[Bags]

I'm 2/3s over on the spectrum.  I love to buy CDs, and still buy a lot.  I have, however, started to exchange burned CDs of bands I don't know, want to listen to, etc.  Basically, CDs I wouldn't buy otherwise.  If I find a band I really like (like Sloan, when a friend gave me One Chord to Another), I buy the rest of the catalog (I bought the other 4 or 5 Sloan CDs within a year).  In terms of my purchases, a bit of sharing usually benefits the artist in the end.
 
 I still experiment and buy something because the buzz is good and it's been described as something I'd like, but I'm not going to do that for every band I hear about.  Just look at this board; though I have hundreds of CDs, I don't know a lot of the bands that are faves on here...

[kosmo vinyl]

Originally posted by mark e smith:
  But emusic had to change because it was not viable.
 
 It was good in some ways and terrible in others. Concentrating on the bad.....It was never going to be more than a niche service because it never had "top 50 artists" on it. Plus I have several albums missing tracks that I tried downloading 5 times or more.
 
 

this is true but you were trying to download tracks when the system was overloaded with users trying to grab as many albums as possible.  i had the same problem, but because i'm still a subscriber i can continue to download, without it counting against my monthly limit, any album/track i've already downloaded.  an itunes user can only download a track once.  also emusic tells you up front what format their downloads are encoded with (192kbps VBR mp3 encoded w/LAME).  I have yet to find in iTunes where it directly says this.  There is mention of AAC but little else.  Buyer beware I guess, and don't accidently delete a track without backing it up.
 
 so what if it's a niche service, you've beginning to sound like the trolls that frequent the emusic bbs.  emusic has a great communitiy of list makers so it was easy to find stuff that one wasn't familiar with. it's got a better selection of the stuff i listen to then itunes, for a lot cheaper.
 
 regardless of whether or not emusic was viable ecomonic model, it will forever define what i view as what an electronic download should cost to me personally.

[ratioci nation]

Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
  an itunes user can only download a track once.

I am not 100% sure, but I don't think this is true.