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Posted by Marco on 09/30/50 11:25
My opinion is that at the moment it's not worth purchasing music online.
Here's my reasons:
1. Downloading music is expensive
What costs are involved with this form of purchase to studios and
artists. I'm doing all the work, selecting, downloading, transferring.
No CD package, no artwork, no shipping costs -- sorry, songs should be
much cheaper.
2. Music licensing of online music is restrictive
I investigated a lot of different places recently such as iTunes,
Napster, MS and so forth. I was shocked to find how restrictive and
limiting all of them are in regards to music licensing.
I don't want to pay for music, download it and a year later discover it
can't be transferred to another computer or MP3 player. Or, as in the
case of Napster, that the music I downloaded doesn't belong to me
anymore once subscription is canceled.
And, no, I don't want to deal with tranfering licenses, copying my MS
license info from on PC to another and any of that other stuff. Haven't
I done enough work downloading in the first place?
As well, what's really frustrating is that they don't clarify licensing
restrictions on the onset, you have to spend an hour to find that
information on most services. Like, you can only transfer the songs you
buy twice, or three times -- I'd like to know that up front.
3. Slaved to music download companies encoding and audio codecs
You have to deal with a mess of different codecs, MP3 players are not
compatible with all services and you're limited to the bitrate used by
the service which is usually 128 kbps.
You're better off just buying a CD, in my opinion (until CD's switch
over copy protection and become limiting as well). At the moment, they
seem to give the best features in regards to fair practice copying and
quality of encoding/codecs (which you can decide yourself, use whatever
your MP3 player likes best).
The only music download place I actually thought was fair and I
ultimately subscribed to was eMusic, great quality MP3's (many are 320
kbps) and no licencing restrictions. But, the one problem with eMusic,
is that their selection of new music is practically non-existent.
Any comments or opinions on this??
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