DRM-Free Is The Way To Be

This has nothing to do with Spore. Sorry.

One of the funnest (see what I did there? It’s topical!) things that Meri and I do after AWA is create some kind of “mix-tape” (well, an MP3 playlist that may or may not be burned to CD for my line-in-less car audio system) of our favorite songs-from-AMVs over the last year.

I’m not going to lie and say I don’t just grab a song or two from friends when they’re the ones that have done the videos (Hell, half the time they’ve sent me the song long ago, anyway). This isn’t going to be any kind of general defense or offense one way or the other on file sharing, though.

However, at the same time, I’m not going to not try and legally pick up some music every so often. I think it’s pretty important. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. I guess it’s as much for me as it is for the artists. Regardless, my point is that the Amazon MP3 service is awesome and you should use it. Right now. Here are the couple songs I grabbed last night:

Asobi Seksu – “Walk On The Moon” (from Koop’s/Jay’s video “Twilight“) – 99 cents
DJ Spoke – “Watch Them Fall Down” (from Xavier’s/Nostromo’s video “Auriga“) – 88 cents

What was really interesting to me was that the first place I looked was still the iTunes Store. For whatever reason, that’s still where I go first. However, I absolutely will not purchase any music from there, these days, unless it’s iTunes Plus (DRM-free and higher bitrate… I think it’s 192 kbps AAC, as opposed to the standard 128 kbps AAC). The compression is better and more efficient with the AAC, so if I can get that version DRM-free, it still makes sense to me to get that above the MP3.

Sounds like the new Android phones are going to have the Amazon service built-in. Oooooh… it’s on, now.

What about you guys? Best source for music? Preferred format? I know you’ve got some thoughts, Mr. Campbell :P.

2 Comments

  1. Favorite source of music? For Japanese music it’s still torrents. I buy OSTs and singles every now and then, but I have to really like them to spend the money on ’em. Shipping from Japan, as you already know, ain’t cheap.

    For my other musical tastes, I go to Amazon MP3 (I suggest you follow them on Twitter to get the daily specials. They even have Friday 5: Five Albums for $5 Each on their tweets! – http://twitter.com/amazonmp3) or iTunes. Recently I’ve been going more to Amazon MP3, but every once in a while I go to iTunes just to see what the top songs in a certain genre are, just to keep up with what’s new out there, since I don’t listen to the radio. I don’t buy from IMS anymore though, just Amazon MP3.

    Preferred format will have to be .mp3 because of how practically everything supports it. Favorite format? Probably FLAC.

    -Jaime D.

  2. Eh, I like CDs. There’s something about buying a CD you just don’t get from downloading an MP3 file. Also, CD audio is uncompressed, thus theoretically better to listen to (I can’t tell the difference between 192kbps MP3 and CD audio though.)

    My favourite format is probably .ogg. Open source is the way everything should be.

    Like Jaime/Karasuhebi though, .mp3 is what I use most of the time. More widely supported (unfortunately).

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