Why paying for music downloads is a rip

26 May 2005 11:30 am

These days everyone is offering legal music downloads. Ok not everyone but a lot of people. Is paying for downloadable music any better than buying a CD though? I'm not sure that it is.

I would have preferred a CD anyway, you actually get something. Plus some of the licensing schemes mean that you loose your music if yu get rid of the software which is just stupid. So I decided to point out why paying for music is way inferior to buying a CD.

You get nothing
With a CD, you have a CD. When you pay for a music download all you get is a file. Sure you can burn your own CDs but it's just not the same is it?

Your license
What you are really paying for when you download something is the license. However with services like Yahoo Unlimited you can actually loose your licenses. How are you supposed to prove you have a license t a song when it has been destroyed?

Lack of trust
The music industry wants you to download music. Why? Because they can keep a tighter hold on you when you buy music. They can put countless rights managements systems into the audio files to stop you making copies.

I mean this is fine when you are offering certain services but give us a break. We are paying for this music rather than downloading it for free like everyone else does so put a little trust in us and get rid of all the restrictions.

Cost
What is it to buy a track these days like $1? So for an entire album that is like $15 or even if they are selling full albums at $10 each that is still around the price of a CD. It's not really any cheaper.

Compression
When you buy a CD you get perfect digital quality. When you download an MP3 you get a lossy compression format. That means that when the audio was converted into MP3 certain parts of it were discarded to make it smaller. As far as I know, the formats you get when you buy a track are the same.

This means two things. Firstly your audio files are lower quality than a CD to begin with. Secondly if you ever wanted to covert them into a different format such as Vorbis or Windows Media Audio, you will loose even more quality as they will discard different bits to what the original format did.

Conclusion
Legally downloadable music has come along way over the past year or two but I still think it has a long way to go. Until more of the problems are fixed I will still be buying my music on good old fashioned CDs.

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