Why I Still Buy CDs

These 2 articles that appeared in today's Washington Post are the reason why I still buy CDs. DRM is the devil himself.

A Messy Age for Music

These days, in the age of digital distribution, we don't need to buy CDs anymore. What we have, instead, are a bunch of online music services, offering songs for sale or rent via quick download to a bunch of digital music players that might or might not actually play them.

Take music fan Chauncey Canfield: He has a whopping 180-gigabyte music collection, an iPod and a smartphone he can fill with songs from his subscription Yahoo Music account. But he can't put Yahoo Music songs on his iPod, and he can't put songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store on his phone.

Canfield knows that iTunes is the most popular online music store, but he avoids it because of the playback restrictions. Instead, he prefers to shop at eMusic, which sells its tracks in the MP3 format, an open technology that works on every music player on the market. Even the iPod.

"The fact that they don't have [anti-piracy controls] on them is absolutely a major plus," he said. "I don't have to segregate my music into various ghettos."

And then this one:

Changing Her Tun on Apple's iPod

I've basically stopped buying music because I'm stuck at a digital music divide.

Every 99-cent song I buy from the iTunes Music Store digs me deeper into an ecosystem that depends on $250 (or more) replacement iPods and closes me off from other cool-but-incompatible devices made by non-Apple Computer companies.

But who among us doesn't find the ease of iTunes totally seductive? The 30-second sample clip? Love it. The option of buying one song off an album? Brilliant. And no more peeling off that super-adhesive tape they put on CD packages!

Once upon a time, music used to account for a measurable chunk of my monthly spending. Now, I agonize, scrutinize, and often forgo clicking "buy" on a song.

I got to this point the way I imagine many others might have.

Three birthdays ago, my generous, tech-loving boyfriend bought me an iridescent green iPod Mini I named Jazzhands. She was cute, light, and way outclassed the generations of Walkman cassette players that came before her.

Please read both of these articles because they are good.

I may be buying a digital player soon, but I won't use the download services. I'll just buy the CD and then rip it to the device I buy. Besides, I still have lots of vinyl as well.