Theft.
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Theft.
All y'all who work full-time jobs with expendable income and don't support your artists should eat a dick.
Amazon MP3, because it's seriously cheap, their cloud service is great, and there's no DRM. I bought 5 CDs last week for around $15, all of which were by artists I really like or really have been wanting to check out for some time. It got beamed straight to my phone and I can listen to it on any machine I go to through their cloud service.
I think the sound quality is pretty great but I'm only a mid-level audiophile (snob); I know trout compression but I couldn't tell you the difference between stuff 320kbps and up. Amazon has consistently delivered though.
I won't accept anything less than FLAC, although this is mostly because most records have troutty mastering and I remaster them. I can't tell a difference between well-encoded 320kbps (i.e. no cutoff at 16.5 kHz like old mp3 encoding would do) and FLAC, but I can tell a difference between music that has been lossy encoded twice and music that has been lossy encoded once. Also 320kbps uses up way too much space on my iPod.
Man, I don't know how you guys do it
Like on a good day I can maybe tell the difference between an actual song and people yelling into tin cans
I suck the music out of the artists themselves and leave them in their beds, shriveled up.
I use Spotify and youtube for most of my means, if I cannot find anything on there I errr... either *yarrrrr* or actually buy the album. If its cheap.
Bandcamp, or i use cds/torrents if i lost a cd
Edit: i dont torrent music i dont have because pirating personally bugs me. I like to support the artists i listen to, i couldnt care less if others do so though.
Relevant
I get that buying an album is better than not, because that is still some money for the artist. But sales from the actual music have not been a proper income for the artists for a long, long time. Like you yourself said, you just bought 5 albums at 3 dollars a piece, factor in the cut taken out by whoever the song/album is sold through, and that most of these bands owe a lot of money to record companies/labels, so that album sale is not going to go a very long way, if anywhere.
All the semi-popular or underground bands I like will tour constantly and make and distribute their own merch, buying a ticket to a show and a t-shirt will be a lot more helpful than buying 10 of their albums.