I agree, there's like one record store within 5 miles of my house. Stupid iTunes!

Even on some days we haven't one person coming in to the store, i just don't get it the prices are unbelievably good.

There's a great little independent store here in Glasgow called Avalanche Records, they also have a branch or two in Edinburgh, and it's usually fairly busy. Most times I'm in there, there's three or four others, and by the time I've settled on something, somebody else has already paid for something.

But yeah, I'm big on physical product when it comes to music. I buy all my music on CD. Never bought anything digitally (although some stuff I've pre-ordered comes with a digital download as well as the CD), nor do I download illegally. As hyperbolic as this sounds, I like the idea that I own a copy of an album, and that music is not a service being provided to me, or sent to me as little digitally compressed files. Sure, DRM is going away, but the CD is the definitive article for me. Unless there's a disc, in a box of some description, it doesn't feel like a real thing to me. The few times I've been given MP3 rips of albums to listen to, it sits on my hard drive and never gets listened to because it doesn't seem like it's an album.

The order of preference for buying music for me is: direct from the artist, direct from the label, from an independent store, HMV, then if all else fails, Amazon.

You are all crazy downloading music has made my life much easier. I still buy albums from my favorite artists in the stores but still I would hate to have to buy the whole album of an artist who I don't like just because I like one song they put out. But I do agree with the fact that people have become immature about music because of I-tunes. Anyway to me it is just music, as long as I can hear it I'm good And remember technology always advances. You can't get stuck with the past.

Dial up fuck yeah!! Remember that aweful noise that the modem made every time you connected to the interwebs? Ah... the good ol' days...

When an album comes out these days all the songs are usually found on youtube. Giving me a chance to listen to every single track on the album, now I don't know about you but I am suffering from the economy and I can't afford to be buying full length albums, especially if I am trying to make music on my own. Shaira's album is completely out on youtube and I am still buying it (I pre-ordered it) because I like all of the songs it and I know by buying the album I will be making my money's worth. And for example I love Green Day's new song "21 Guns" and two other tracks(which aren't singles) from the album, but will I buy the album? No because I would waste 8-9 bucks on the 14-15 tracks I would never listen to again .

Many of the stuff I listen to is not even out on I-tunes. It is available for free download by files. I'm trying to let everyone now that I love pop music but that is not the only thing I listen to. And the only reason I don't even bother to mentioning the stuff, is because 99% off the stuff is in Spanish and is music you probably never heard of.

And when it comes to buying a full length album on I-tunes I don't see any difference except that it is not physical and you don't get the fancy artwork. When it comes down to it, it is the same sound, same length. Nothing changes. Now if you need the actual album in order to get the feel from it, then the artist or band did not do their job to make sure the sound was more approachable than some fancy case and a booklet.

Edited by user 01 November 2009 04:03:01(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

See, that's the big difference right there. What you're getting in iTunes or wherever else is compressed, and personally, I can hear the difference between an average quality MP3 and a CD clear as day. But the point of having the CD is, more than just the actual sleevenotes and artwork (which are often very spartan), is that I can hold it in my hand, and I can put it into a CD player, without having to be at a computer, or syncing it to my mp3 player, or jacking my mp3 player into the back of a stereo, or whatever. The music is its own physical thing.

I guess the notion now is that all these multimedia things will converge into one singular device - see the iPhone - and everyone's media will be in this one little thing... I don't buy that for a second. I don't want to listen to music on a phone, I don't want to surf the web on my TV, I don't want to read books off a screen... For me, I pick an album to listen to like I pick a movie to watch. I want to take a thing, put it into another thing, and then sit down and enjoy it. I don't want to press a button and let a machine pick how it thinks I might best be entertained right now with a smart playlist or any of that, because ultimately it comes down to that great Orwellian idea that maybe, deep down inside all of us, there's a place that they can't get to.

It's still taken for granted that seeing a movie at the cinema is the way to see it. If not that, then on somebody's big screen with the lights out. Yet now it's taken for granted that the way to listen to a song is on youtube, through shitty computer speakers, while chatting on Facebook, or blaring out of awful iPod headphones on a bus.

And just to secure my reputation as a anorak-wearing nerd; almost every album I've ever bought, I remember buying, I remember listening to for the first time, I remember listening to it in a certain specific place, at a certain specific time, I remember the sleeve notes, the artwork, the little details here and there, the fact that the dedication inside Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's "In Glorious Times" to Nils Frykdahl's late brother Per is missing all the letter 'r's for some reason beyond me, the fact that Frank Zappa's "Waka/Jawaka" features an instrument he called Electric Bed-springs, the fact that I was listening to Magma's "Live" while walking up Burghmuir Road in Perth one beautiful September evening in 2004, that I was on a bus in the Summer of 2005 listening to A Silver Mt Zion's first album after having left a group of people before they went to a house party and that I was wearing a shirt I had bought earlier that day and that when I got back my stepfather had placed my still-powered up laptop in the washing basket where it had gotten extremely hot...... and all that seemingly irrelevant stuff actually colours my opinion and enjoyment of an album or an artist in a way that I've just never had simply listening to music at a computer.

Without a doubt I prefer purchasing my music from a record store instead of online. I just love the experience of browsing through hundreds of CD's and maybe coming across something different. I have downloaded the odd song online but I'll always gravitate to the physical product.

It can do. I mean not in the same way. But say you are in the record store and you see a CD and you go "fuck, I've want to hear that band for ages", it's hardly different to someone mentioning the same band and you go "fuck I've wanted to hear that band for ages" and then jumping onto megadownload.com

Don't get me wrong I love CD's but what I am saying it shouldn't be a difference music wise when it comes to a digital and a physical.
I actually do miss when how back in the days, Tuesdays would be mayor in the US, when it came to purchasing music. I remember seeing lines of people purchasing music in the store, and now you don't see that as often. But like I said technology is always changing, doesn't mean you have to, but you eventually will.