Buying digital music

Since a bit before the turn of the millennium I've been purchasing the music that I listen to, initially in CD format and then online once that became an option. I still buy music even though everyone else seems to have switched to streaming services. I haven't been able to find much online discussion of this practice (threads on r/NoStupidQuestions don't count), so I'm writing this page in an attempt to explain the why and how of it.

Why buy music?

Definitely not to save money. Purchasing a single album often costs $10 USD, which is about the same as a month of access to a streaming service. However, when I buy music, it's mine for the rest of my life (as long as I don't mess up and lose it). It feels good to know that it won't be a recurring monthly cost in perpetuity and that it won't disappear due to licensing negotiations that are outside my control.

Some of the music that I want to listen to isn't available on streaming services, and it's nice to not need to use multiple websites or apps to listen to music. I believe that some streaming services allow users to upload their own music or play local files, but then I'd be dependent on them not losing the files or shutting down with little warning, or I'd need to duplicate my music across all of my devices.

I value having complete control over my music. For example, I can:

• convert it to different formats if I want
• play it offline on any device that's capable of decoding MP3 files
• create my own playlists
• rate it and then only play songs that I really like
• tag it and only play instrumental songs
• keep track of my play history and listen to songs that I haven't heard in a long time

All of these are things that I do right now. And if I think of something new in the future, I can do that too. If I use a streaming service, I'm restricted to what some unaccountable company chooses to allow me to do. If (when) the service shuts down, I may not be able to export my own data (ratings, tags, etc.).

Finally, buying music supports artists. Streaming does not. The 2021 BBC article “MPs call for complete reset of music streaming to ensure fair pay for artists” has some illuminating numbers:

At present, Spotify is believed to pay between £0.002 and £0.0038 per stream, while Apple Music pays about £0.0059. YouTube pays the least - about £0.00052 (or 0.05 pence) per stream.

All that money goes to rights-holders, a blanket term that covers everything from massive record companies to artists who release their own music. That money is then divided up between everyone involved in making the record.

Often, the recording artist will only receive about 13% of the revenue, with labels and publishers keeping the rest.

In other words, the musician will receive 0.0073684 of a US cent for each stream on YouTube (using a 1-GBP-to-1.09-USD conversion rate as of late September 2022). They'll need about 13,571 streams to make a dollar, and 204 million streams to make the US pre-tax minimum annual wage of $15,080.

Where to buy music

Wikipedia's Comparison of digital music stores article provides a high-level overview of the different options, but my short answer is: Do a search for "[artist name] bandcamp" and buy music from Bandcamp if possible.

Bandcamp

Bandcamp is my preferred place to buy music. They take 15% of sales of digital items, dropping to 10% after $5,000 is reached. Starting in March 2020, they also began having monthly "Bandcamp Fridays" during which they waive their cut entirely and give all the money to artists. I find the site's interface to be straightforward, a variety of audio formats are available, and it's easy to download an album as a single ZIP file with high-resolution cover art included in most cases. Bandcamp usually sends email notifications when a new album is released by an artist whom I'm following, but I also wrote a tiny program named watchbrainz that notifies me when releases are added to MusicBrainz.

Bandcamp has a wide enough selection of music that inertia keeps me using it, but I've also had good experiences with Bleep and Boomkat. I think their catalogs skew more toward electronic music. Labels also sometimes sell digital music directly, e.g. Warp Records.

Google, Apple, and Amazon

Buying music published by the three major record labels (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group) is harder. I haven't been able to find authoritative information online about the cut taken by the major services, but this Quora thread suggests that Apple takes 30% of music sales with an additional 7% going to "integrators", while Amazon takes a full 40%. I assume that the lion's share of the remaining 60% or so is going to go to the record label instead of the artist. The music industry is terrible.

I used to buy albums through Google Play Music, largely because it was easier to work with than the competition: Apple makes it difficult or impossible to download music if you haven't bought into the Mac ecosystem, and Amazon used to require using a ridiculous Amazon MP3 Downloader app to download albums after purchasing them.

However, Google Play Music was shut down in October 2020. Amazon would be the obvious replacement, but I'm disturbed by how they've eliminated all competition in online retail and I don't want to give them money if I can avoid it. (Also, it's really weird how it's frequently cheaper to buy a physical CD and then download the AutoRip MP3s than it is to purchase only the MP3s! Here's some discussion. As far as I can tell, Amazon has a bunch of CDs that they bought, and maybe continue to buy, on the cheap. They can often give you MP3s without paying any licensing fees to the rights holder if they know you own the CD. If you instead buy the MP3s, Amazon needs to pay licensing fees. Intellectual property law is strange!)

Tidal

I initially settled on the Tidal store. I figured that major-label artists are going to get shafted by the labels no matter what, but by buying from Tidal, I felt like I was at least giving the distribution cut to a smaller Norwegian company instead of to Amazon or Apple. However, Square bought a majority stake in Tidal in March 2021, so it turns out that my money ended up going to amoral tech oligarchs anyway. It probably didn't matter much in the long run, since Tidal gave up and shut down their download store in October 2022.

7digital

I also starting using 7digital, which as far as I can tell is just a boring British company that's partially-owned by another boring British company. The price for a given album on 7digital was often a few dollars lower than on Tidal, and I didn't notice any obvious data-quality problems¹. 7digital seems to cater to audiophiles (albums are offered as 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC and even 24-bit/96kHz FLAC), but there's usually a cheaper 320 kbps MP3 version available. They added regional restrictions in 2022 and their catalog seems to be shrinking, though.

Qobuz

Qobuz may also be worth looking into as a retailer that's seemingly not connected to a tech giant, but I think their catalog is smaller and I ran into problems with their regional restrictions as well. Their focus seems to be on high-resolution audio (which doesn't interest me), and album prices are often higher to match. The name “Qobuz” is hard to remember, too.

Record Store Day

In early 2023, I tried to buy a digital album through Record Store Day, which seems to be a company (?) attached to the identically-named annual event promoting independently-owned record stores. I think that their goal is great (not wanting to support behemoths like Amazon and Apple is the whole reason that I'm looking at other retailers!), but my purchase didn't go smoothly.

The Record Store Day website doesn't seem to have an album-search feature, so I found the album page via Google. The site listed 14 record stores, only four of which actually had purchase links. I chose a store in Florida at random and was sent to their checkout page.

After entering my payment details, I was sent to a download page (hosted by a company called MediaNet) with an individual HTTP link for each track, which Chrome refused to download since the page was served over HTTPS. I didn't see any obvious way to override this in Chrome, so I ended up downloading the tracks using wget. Unfortunately, MediaNet's infrastructure seems to only permit a single download of each track, and it apparently counted my initial failed attempt using Chrome, so I was left being unable to download the album's first track.

I sent an email message to MediaNet's support address and got an automated response telling me to create an account at their ZenDesk instance. I filed a ticket there but hadn't heard back after a few hours, so I also sent email to the record store's support address. To their credit, they replied quickly and said they'd escalate. A few days later, I got a response from someone at Audible Magic (a company that apparently purchased MediaNet in 2021) saying that they had reset the download page for me.

However, it now just displayed a “There was an error retrieving downloads” error. After a bit more back-and-forth with support, I eventually narrowed this down to an apparent geographical restriction. I was finally able to download the first track by using a proxy. The files themselves were 256 kbps constant-bitrate MP3s, which I suspect have the distinction of both being larger than and sounding worse than 192 kbps variable-bitrate MP3s.

So… use at your own risk, I guess. I initially thought that Record Store Day was connected to MediaNet, but now I suspect that they just link to record stores, and it was the store that had partnered with MediaNet. Maybe my experience would've been better if I'd happened to choose a store that used a different download provider, but maybe it would've been worse.

Other options

I'm a bit surprised that the four major record labels haven't each set up their own online storefronts similar to what's happened in the video streaming market, but I suspect it's a sign of how non-lucrative music sales are compared to streaming.

If I can't find a digital version of an album (usually because it's old or was released in another country), I'll occasionally buy a CD online and rip it, but that's luckily a rare occurrence. And as an absolute last resort for music that's completely unavailable via conventional means, there's always youtube-dl…

Formats

And just to mention it, if you're an audiophile, audio formats may influence your decision-making process as well. After listening to various online A/B comparisons with a decent pair of headphones, I decided that anything beyond a sensibly-encoded 192 kbps MP3 file is wasted on me. If you have better speakers (and ears), you may feel differently and insist on (much larger) losslessly-encoded FLAC files.² As a fascinating digression, you should be aware that Universal Music Group was adding audible watermarks to their digital tracks not long ago. When I took Matt Montag's Audio Watermark Listening Test, I was able to identify the watermarked track in 12 out of 16 samples. The watermarks would probably be even more noticeable to someone with better ears. They've supposedly been mostly phased out as of mid-2020, but it's something else to keep in mind.

How to preserve it

If you're buying music, you need a backup strategy to make sure that you don't lose everything if a hard drive dies or your house burns down. Even if you're using a service that lets you re-download music that you've paid for in the past, it would be tedious to manually click on hundreds or thousands of albums. Backing up your computer is beyond the scope of this page, but I recommend regularly copying your data to one or more external hard drives and also using some sort of online service for disaster recovery.

Google Cloud Storage gives you 5 GB of free storage and then charges $0.004 (that is, slightly less than half a cent) per GB per month at the "Coldline Storage" level, which is still fast enough for realtime streaming. I think that Amazon S3's "Glacier Instant Retrieval" storage class is comparable.

Stories of users being spuriously locked out of their accounts are legion, so it's wise to make an additional backup using a different provider. S3 Glacier Deep Archive and GCP Archive both currently cost around $0.001 per GB per month.

To fix up the ID3 tags (artist, title, album, etc.) on my music, I use the Picard app, which downloads metadata from MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is a publicly-maintained database of music information operated by a nonprofit, sort of like a more-structured, less-mismanaged Wikipedia.

How to listen to it

This is where I need to acknowledge my good luck in being able to write software. Over a long period of time, I've put together a system where my music is stored online and streamed via an Android app and a web app that work exactly the way that I want.

All of the music is accessible anywhere I go, and the Android app caches songs locally so they can be played in airplane mode:

I can rate and tag songs and then search using a variety of criteria:

I haven't gone to the trouble of getting this software to the point where it would be easy for others to use (it currently requires familiarity with the Linux command line), mostly because I figure that there aren't many people out there with big music collections who haven't already figured out some way to listen to them. Let me know if this sort of thing sounds interesting to you, though.