Samstag, 13. Mai 2006, 15:02

Well really unusually for this part of the world the weather has been lovely for the last month up here in North Wales - and with the shifting temperatures my musical tastes get dragged towards sunnier climes. Which of course means a fresh foray into music. Sadly the summer doesn't also bring in caravans of bedouin traders laden with cool music from the desert so off I go to the internet…which brings me to the point of this post - DRM free music available online…

Now of course I occasionally download stuff via P2P - usually ultraobscure stuff - and also from 'grey area' russian loophole sites such as allofmp3.com, mp3spy.ru and mp3search.ru etc but most of my music comes from completely above boards sites - iTunes, emusic.com and (most recently) wippit.com. I also still buy the occasional CD, but here's what I think of these stores:

First off iTunes. I almost feel a bit dirty admitting this, but I do buy stuff from here every now and then - but not much, maybe once every two or three months. Why so little? Well sodding DRM of course - why pay so much for a track that an album comes in not significantly cheaper than an actual CD with the extra 'advantages' of no liner notes, no physical backup, AACs encoded at 128k (which is OK, but certainly not great) and DRM which means if I ever jump ship from the iPod wagon I'm stuck with having to burn and re-encode all the tracks to MP3? No, I can't think of a good reason either…

Next eMusic. Vast bulk of my music comes from here. Basically you subscribe on a monthly basis and you can download a set number of tracks each month (I get 90). Everything is encoded as MP3s at 192k (which is better than the 128K AACs from iTunes) - and joy of joys is DRM free. Also if I ever lost any files you can redownload anything I downloaded previously all over again so long as I'm still subscribed. It specialises in independent music - which is great for me as I don't listen to much 'mainstream' stuff, and it's cheap enough that I can happily explore all sorts of genres without feeling too guilty. Only niggle for me is that living in Europe you miss out on a fair amount of stuff that's only available to people in the US - not that important though as I'll never be able to download everything I'm interested in.

Finally of this mini-roundup - Wippit. Very new to me this one, I only subscribed a couple of days ago. It's another subscription site, except in this case when you're subscribed you can download as many DRM 192k MP3 as you can fit through your bandwidth! Selection is much worse than with eMusic (60,000 tracks as opposed to over 1,000,000+ and growing) but on the other hand they have a lot of stuff that's limited to the US on eMusic (eg most of the Ninja Tune catalogue) and some big names like Franz Ferdinand. Much clunkier to use than either iTunes or eMusic but for me worth it for the Ninja Tune stuff.

So both eMusic and Wippit are DRM free and also much, much cheaper than iTunes. Not suprisingly that's where most of music cash goes - and therefore artists on those stores are getting their royalties whilst artists solely on iTunes on the other hand don't. When will record labels learn that DRM doesn't stop copying, it just annoys music fans and reduces sales for musicians?

Anyway, just wondering if people have any recommendations for other (above board) DRM free music sites? I've heard of Calabash but never used it, and also I know there's net labels out there that I've never explored properly so I'd love to hear about them.