Now that iTunes tossed the music DRM I no longer have a problem buying from them. Well, except for the price. Even before they jacked up the prices on some tracks to $1.29 and broke the ten dollar album barrier I never really liked their album pricing.

That’s right. There are cheaper places than iTunes to legally buy and download music. Here they are listed in order of which I check when looking to buy.

Aime Street

Two things make these guys unique: they price based on the demand for the album and song separately (with price caps), and they let you earn credit with the recommendation system. Yes, there are free songs too. Tracks are capped at 99 cents, albums are capped at $9.99.

The majority of the albums I’ve bought have been in the five dollar range, plus or minus two dollars.

Once you buy a track you’re allowed to lay down a REC (short for reccomendation.) Every time you top up your account you get a few reccomendation points. Once you lay down a REC you give a short review. Then the price of the track at the time you put your REC is recorded. When the price goes up you can cash out your RECs. If the price was originally free, you cash out for the difference. If the price wasn’t free, you get half the difference.

It’s a novel system and rewards finding new talent or indulging in the long tail.

Pros:

• No monthly fee.
• Cheap! Often cheaper than eMusic and far cheaper than iTunes.
• Great for discovering new music.
• Allows you to stream your music collection via flash.
• Allows you to download as a zip file with no download manager required.
• Long samples before you buy. Usually between a minute to a minute and a half, unlike the usual 30 second sample.

Cons:

• I have a hard time finding artists I already knew. Only about one in ten of what I was looking for was available.

eMusic

Most of my digital collection has come from eMusic now. Excluding audiobooks I’ve currently got 397 tracks and I paid about forty cents each. eMusic works on a subscription model and, unfortunately, does not let you carry over track credits from one month to the next. When you don’t use all of your tracks in one month you’ve subsidized someone else’s purchases.

The majority of the albums I’ve bought are twelve tracks, so about $4.80 each.

If you use emusic then be sure to use every credit at the end of the month. The day before I refresh I usually buy either a bunch of singles or a half album, and the day of the refresh I buy the rest of the album. Inconvenient but I want to get my money’s worth.

If you have a credit card than you may as well sign up to eMusic for the free trail to get 25 tracks and one audiobook.

Pros:

• Cheap! Lowest price subscription works out to $0.40 per track.
• Also sells audiobooks cheaper than Audible.

Cons:

• Monthly fee
• No rollover of credits from month to month, unlike Audible
• You can waste credits if you click “buy album” and it happens to include a bunch of dead air 30 second tracks used for padding before a hidden track.

Puretracks

These guys are a Canadian company. You can buy gift cards with cash at many gas stations and electronics stores so no credit card is required. They have the same pricing as iTunes, 99 cents per track and albums that are about $9.99. If your music is likely to be in a bargain bin you’re better off raiding the local HMV.

For music that the price of the CD is higher, I’d buy off Puretracks over iTunes solely because they allow you to download in MP3 format. My portable doesn’t support AAC and I’d rather avoid transcoding from one lossy format to another.

Pros:

• Wider selection
• No credit card required
• Available in MP3 format as well as WMA

Cons:

• No cheaper than iTunes
• CDs that go on special at HMV or Best Buy wind up being cheaper than Puretracks

And that’s my order of stores that I cruise before buying. I’ll even buy from Aime Street on impulse because, well, if a few samples sound good then I’m willing to plunk down three bucks for an album that has a few RECs on it.

Some of my American readers might be asking “Where’s Amazon MP3?” It’s not on the list because as a Canadian I can’t buy from there.^[0]

I hope this list helps some fellow music buyers. Please leave a comment if you have more stores to suggest!^[1]

^[0] Without generating a fake address and buying gift certificates off ebay, or using a prepaid credit card with a fake American address, or otherwise committing fraud.
^[1] Magnatune is a label, they don’t count.

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• Ding-dong, DRM Is Dead – But Here Comes Variable Pricing (gigaom.com)

Looks like I still have 7mbit free, and that’s including seeding on BitTorrent.

Allegedly the new track was mastered yesterday. The comment from the ID3 tag reads “Go to www.nin.com May 5.”

I’m on Bell’s $7 unlimited browsing plan. The Terms of Service clearly state that streaming audio is not allowed. It’s one of those clauses that they use to terminate accounts that go over some sliding limit of profitable bandwidth use. Since this month I had only used four megabytes and the average for killed accounts seems to be about two thousand, I decided to push my luck. I decided to forego my iPod in favour of my HTC Touch and Windows Media Player. (The Touch is notable as being the only smartphone able to get a consumer unlimited data plan in Canada.)

My stream of choice was Digitally Imported’s Trance stream. I gave it a go at home on the 96 kilobit WMA stream and was surprised to hear very choppy music with the default buffering. I benchmarked my phone at an average download of 400 kilobit over download, and now it can’t take 96 kilobit? I double checked and Windows Media Player was set for a 384 kilobit cellular connection. When using TCPMP I was able to get 96 kilobit MP3 reliably without any changes to buffer settings but I spent most of the day using WMP.

I set myself up for 40 kilobit music stream. It played on my phone just fine with the basic Windows Media Player that came with the device. Next up: Getting this music through my headphones.

This was trickier. The phone itself has no headphone jack. It does come with a gadget that splits the USB mini jack into USB jack and what they label a headphone jack. It’s not your standard 8mm jack, it’s about the same size as a USB-mini jack but asymmetric and skewed. I assume it’s some jack that’s meant for cellular headsets. There’s also a converter to something sub-8mm that I found useless. Into this splitter I plugged in a pair of earphones with the skewed adapter that came with the Touch.

At 40 kilobit I was able to walk around downtown Toronto towards campus with no skips or bumps. Instead of being pleased with this I was just disappointed that I couldn’t use my own headphones. It’s impossible to give a good judgement of sound quality here.

Even in a noisy environment I’m able to tell the difference between 40 kilobit WMA and 96 kilobit WMA when using the pair of AKG K27i headphones I use for walkabouts. And that’s not even considering the pair of Sennheiser HD555 that I use for home enjoyment of music. On the pair that came with the device I couldn’t tell between 40 kilobit and 96 kilobit in a quiet environment, and I haven’t figured out how to connect my real headphones yet.

So far the only thing I can say is it’s a pain.

Well, everyone else thought so too, and his site went down under load. He posted a link to Amazon’s music store so his fans could still buy the album, but I decided that I’d wait until Reznor’s site went back up so he could get a bigger cut of my $5. I’m very slowly downloading Ghosts I-IV from the official site now.

I decided to check out the Amazon store too, and after sampling Y34RZ3r0r3mix3d I decided to buy it. Here’s what I saw.

So I can’t buy the album, yet I can install the downloader? Why do you want me to install a downloader that’s useless to me, Amazon? Ah well. I’m impressed that they offered a Linux version, even though I still don’t know why they require you to use a downloader to grab unprotected music.

Out of curiosity I attempted to buy the album anyways. Amazon asked me for a new American billing address. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to try to fake one with my Canadian credit card so I gave up.

With that avenue closed off to me I looked to iTunes. A dollar more expensive, and laden with DRM. Wonderful. I guess I won’t be buying Y34RZ3r0r3mix3d after all, but I’m very happy with Ghosts.