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I completely understand the hobbyist appeal - it's the same reason why people still buy hard copy books and comics - but from the average consumer perspective t

I completely understand the hobbyist appeal - it's the same reason why people still buy hard copy books and comics - but from the average consumer perspective there's no real reason to do it since you can easily buy the same or better quality tunes direct from digital distributors. Nowadays I most only buy music on Bandcamp, and if I want to throw more cash to the artist there are other venues like Patreon or even just a Paypal account where I can do that. Paying for physical media or merch is of course another indirect way to funnel money to the creators, but if getting money to the creator is the main goal, there are often more efficient ways to do it too.

iggldiggl 4y ago
> the same or better quality [...] direct from digital distributors Not wanting to object fundamentally, as enough of my recent music purchases have indeed been digital downloads, however I'm still glad that at least for now CDs still exist and provide an alternative option: - Some digital releases have been somewhat mangled in a very minor (the mouse squeak at the end of 3:47 EST is missing) or somewhat more major (several live albums/albums with live content of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series are missing the pre-gap material between the individual tracks) fashion. Okay, in the former case I've simply grabbed the squeak off a Youtube recording and edited it back on, but in the latter case just getting the CDs is the most sensible option. - Cover art beyond the front cover and liner notes are mostly missing. Okay, sometimes they're forgettable anyway and after all the music is the main thing, but sometimes it's still a bit of a shame to miss out on those things. In principle at least Apple/iTunes does have facilities for including a PDF booklet together with an album download, but in practice at least for the kind of music I'm interested in, encountering such a thing seems to be the exception rather than the norm. The Bootleg Series again is being a culprit here – personally I find the liner notes definitively interesting to read, but online you're getting none of that. (On the other hand kudos to whoever made sure to include the booklet for the Traveling Wilburys Collection on iTunes!) - Occasionally (not often, but definitively sometimes), the (new, not used!) CD turns out to cost noticeably less than the digital download. - Remasters are par for the course (though in some circles even those can provoke heated discussions about whether a certain remaster is really better or not), but with remixes the difference is more immediately noticeable even to someone like me. Sometimes remixes are being offered as an alternative version, and you can still buy the original version if you prefer that, but sometimes the remixed version is replacing the original albums. Online that means that subsequently piracy is your only choice of still obtaining the older mixes, whereas with CDs you've still got a chance on the second hand market. - Where live albums are mastered with a pre-gap between tracks, it turns out I sometimes (e.g. especially when there's some stage banter related to the upcoming song) prefer the pre-gap to be tacked onto the beginning of the next track instead of the end of the previous track as seems to be the usual standard. When ripping a CD myself I can easily adjust that, when buying a download less so. (Having the pre-gap at the start of a track does have the trade-off that the music doesn't start playing immediately, but on the other hand during shuffling it means that any preceding stage banter remains together with the track it belongs to, and personally I find the latter more important.) Though I guess you can classify some of those objections as somewhat "hobbyist", too… :-)
- alisonatwork 4y ago
  I generally agree on all of your points. Trust me, some of the CDs I lost in that flood were extremely rare and don't exist anywhere to purchase or download. They were tragic losses. For years I had a discogs.com account that I meticulously updated with everything in my collection. I get that there are differences between what is legally available as the "best" remastered version of the album and the original version as it was released on record or tape or CD back in the day. But if your goal is not to give money to the artist and instead just find the best version of the song, you can usually better do that through piracy. The artist doesn't get any money either way - whether you bought a second-hand album from your local record store or downloaded a version online - who cares? The one case where original media is interesting is if nobody made a version available online via piracy. And that's a sad state of affairs. As I mentioned earlier - I have lost dozens of CDs that never got released online, because they were small runs on indie labels or just independently released back in the day before the internet was a thing... Well now every time one of those sorts of CDs gets destroyed in a flood, it's one less copy of that song in the wider world. If anything, people should be uploading the fuck out of all they got, because otherwise all those great indie artists of the 90s (never mind the decades prior) will disappear into obscurity and what's the point of their music then? Digitize everything is my opinion. Digitize it, upload it, share it. It's the best way to preserve the culture of past years/decades/eras.

iggldiggl 4y ago

> the same or better quality [...] direct from digital distributors Not wanting to object fundamentally, as enough of my recent music purchases have indeed been digital downloads, however I'm still glad that at least for now CDs still exist and provide an alternative option: - Some digital releases have been somewhat mangled in a very minor (the mouse squeak at the end of 3:47 EST is missing) or somewhat more major (several live albums/albums with live content of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series are missing the pre-gap material between the individual tracks) fashion. Okay, in the former case I've simply grabbed the squeak off a Youtube recording and edited it back on, but in the latter case just getting the CDs is the most sensible option. - Cover art beyond the front cover and liner notes are mostly missing. Okay, sometimes they're forgettable anyway and after all the music is the main thing, but sometimes it's still a bit of a shame to miss out on those things. In principle at least Apple/iTunes does have facilities for including a PDF booklet together with an album download, but in practice at least for the kind of music I'm interested in, encountering such a thing seems to be the exception rather than the norm. The Bootleg Series again is being a culprit here – personally I find the liner notes definitively interesting to read, but online you're getting none of that. (On the other hand kudos to whoever made sure to include the booklet for the Traveling Wilburys Collection on iTunes!) - Occasionally (not often, but definitively sometimes), the (new, not used!) CD turns out to cost noticeably less than the digital download. - Remasters are par for the course (though in some circles even those can provoke heated discussions about whether a certain remaster is really better or not), but with remixes the difference is more immediately noticeable even to someone like me. Sometimes remixes are being offered as an alternative version, and you can still buy the original version if you prefer that, but sometimes the remixed version is replacing the original albums. Online that means that subsequently piracy is your only choice of still obtaining the older mixes, whereas with CDs you've still got a chance on the second hand market. - Where live albums are mastered with a pre-gap between tracks, it turns out I sometimes (e.g. especially when there's some stage banter related to the upcoming song) prefer the pre-gap to be tacked onto the beginning of the next track instead of the end of the previous track as seems to be the usual standard. When ripping a CD myself I can easily adjust that, when buying a download less so. (Having the pre-gap at the start of a track does have the trade-off that the music doesn't start playing immediately, but on the other hand during shuffling it means that any preceding stage banter remains together with the track it belongs to, and personally I find the latter more important.) Though I guess you can classify some of those objections as somewhat "hobbyist", too… :-)

alisonatwork 4y ago
I generally agree on all of your points. Trust me, some of the CDs I lost in that flood were extremely rare and don't exist anywhere to purchase or download. They were tragic losses. For years I had a discogs.com account that I meticulously updated with everything in my collection. I get that there are differences between what is legally available as the "best" remastered version of the album and the original version as it was released on record or tape or CD back in the day. But if your goal is not to give money to the artist and instead just find the best version of the song, you can usually better do that through piracy. The artist doesn't get any money either way - whether you bought a second-hand album from your local record store or downloaded a version online - who cares? The one case where original media is interesting is if nobody made a version available online via piracy. And that's a sad state of affairs. As I mentioned earlier - I have lost dozens of CDs that never got released online, because they were small runs on indie labels or just independently released back in the day before the internet was a thing... Well now every time one of those sorts of CDs gets destroyed in a flood, it's one less copy of that song in the wider world. If anything, people should be uploading the fuck out of all they got, because otherwise all those great indie artists of the 90s (never mind the decades prior) will disappear into obscurity and what's the point of their music then? Digitize everything is my opinion. Digitize it, upload it, share it. It's the best way to preserve the culture of past years/decades/eras.