Where do you get music anymore...

[Doppleganger]

My dad started up a store selling music CDs from his collection, and I was interested in buying some singles of stuff I like on YouTube for my mp3 player...which is actually a .flac player.

Why the disparity?

Mp3 - $1.33
CD - $36.99

Huh?! Mp3s are literal trash-tier, you can just rip the audio from a YT video if you wanted artifact-ridden, compressed audio. Spotify and Pandora are the same, everything is compressed.

But why the massive premium for lossless? Heck, CDs are actually rare on Amazon and eBay.

What the heck happened?!

[blu3shift]

i'm late but i think it's a combination of nostalgia, audiophiles, and a shift to streaming services. ever since spotify took off a whole bunch of tech companies realized that it would be much easier to make money by having customers pay monthly for access to a music catalog, and major labels realized that they could get more listeners by publishing on those platforms. couple that with copyright laws and licensing fees becoming incredibly expensive recently and you have yourself a recipe for not selling music anymore

of course, major releases still get digital versions that you can buy. while our options are unfortunately very few now, itunes and amazon (and possibly more that i don't know about) both offer new albums for sale and probably will continue to for the foreseeable future. it's becoming too expensive to release on CD (i'll get around to why later), so it's definitely not as common

now things get interesting when it comes to independently released music and minor labels. because it's really stifling to try and manage releasing an album in all the traditional ways, they've stuck to online releases—HOWEVER, because of the little overhead that comes with not being a gigantic record label they're able to sell music at far less. you'll typically see a bandcamp album go for anything in the $5-15 range (and prices are flexible, meaning that you can actually pay as much as you want for it).

i've kind of ignored the elephant in the room here and that's physical releases. while CDs do still get recorded and sent out to stores, they've fallen out of favor in lieu of...vinyl records. that's right, we've somehow come back around to playing our music through needles and turntables, and a lot of people are actually really okay with this. i think it, again, stems from audiophiles; i've seen many a post on the internet outlining how superior analog is to digital recordings (i personally don't buy it, but your mileage may vary). nostalgia is also another major driving factor, some just prefer the novelty and memories of putting on an LP as opposed to hooking up a CD player.

all of this is coming from an outsider's perspective though, so i could be getting some things wrong. i've heard that cassettes(!) are on the rise too so that could be interesting to see pan out. either way it's simply more convenient to own your music digitally because you don't have to break out a disc and stick it in a player when you could instead just double-click on a FLAC or whatever wild lossless format you use in your music library and listen to it that way.

[Doppleganger]

My dad is one of those audoiphiles actually and was a former collector of records. The reason we've moved back to vinyl is that it's an analog recording, and the first digital sampling of CD's back in the 1990s were at 16 bits. But new recordings from the original sources are actually lower quality (if they weren't destroyed in the UMG fire) because of degradation in the original recording medium. So companies are instead going back and digitally frankensteining those original 16 bit recordings with synthetic, as that produces a better sound than the new releases.

My lamentation was more, if you want to get a release from a YouTuber, it's only in mp3 format. You are paying money for virtually the same product that comes off the YouTube video itself, so...why? Any of the video rippers would do that for free. Perhaps I should get access to the highest quality .flac file which one can't get simply rehosting as a video on YT due to their compression.

I ended up buying a bunch of physical CDs but they're basically nonexistnt outside of Japanese stuff for newer artists.

[NakiaFlatley]

been a hot minute since i've posted on a forum (especially a vbul)

[NakiaFlatley]

okay with this. i think it, again, stems from audiophiles; i've seen many a post on the internet outlining how superior analog is to digital recordings

[NakiaFlatley]

You can just rip the audio from a YT video if you wanted artifact-ridden, compressed audio.

[NakiaFlatley]

his collection, and I was interested in buying some singles.