this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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A long time ago, you could go to a special store and trade government paper for music disks and tape that you got to keep forever.
Same but I have a huge collection of digital media.
Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart's content.
Spotify was always for chumps.
This one time at band camp...
Alright, I got an eighth. How do I trade it for music?
Come to my house and I'll play you some of my CDs
When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.
honestly, most of my CDs have been used once: Put in a PC and ripped (to 96kbps MP3s, of course!)
That bitrate seems low? I always thought 160-192kbps was the floor for a decent sounding rip, but it’s been over a decade since I’ve even had a CD so maybe things are different now
The Bitrate part was a joke, yes. 96k is low, although I just remembered a special mp3 codec from NERO that allowed for such low bitrate, at the same perceived sound quality as 128kbps.
But obviously, all my CDs have been ripped as either V2, V0 or 320kbps - I personally have not noticed any difference to FLAC files with either of those qualities, I guess my ears are not sensitive enough.
Almost no one can, or have equipment that can make the difference. That being said, the difference between an old mp3 and a new one is sometimes noticeable at the same bitrate. The encoding algorithm has improved a quite lot since the late 90s. I bet a lot of people who say they hear the difference think about those old encodes.
I keep flacs as a master format that I make new encodes from when I want it on my phone and such though.
Opus/ogg @256 sounds at least as good as mp3 @320.
Yeah, that's low. I don't bother with anything below 320 kbps.
Where do you buy them from?
Qobuz. And sometimes bandcamp
I mostly buy from Bandcamp. Do you have the special Qibuz subscription to get discounts on purchases, and is it worth it ?
Nah. I don't bother with that. I can't listen to unlimited amounts of music anyway, and buying fewer albums I care more about makes me listen to them more instead, I'd say. I already have a massive music catalog going back to the early 2000s when I bought CDs, pirated a lot and just kept all of it on my NAS.
Thanks
Im gonna guess bandcamp?
Mostly Qobuz.
Oh, I thought that was only indie artists
Dunno about the user you asked, but I've used Bandcamp for that.
I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).
Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.
I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don't know if it's harder right now or not.
They want fuckin 40 bucks for a vinyl these days and they don't even throw in a digital download for that price, and the radio is owned by like three companies unless you live near a college station.
The contracts that steal music from artists haven't changed one iota. Unless you've got juice like Paul McCarty, Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, and even then it can be a fight that takes years.
I have a feeling it's easier to put your music out there as an independant artists. There's always someone taking a cut but the contacts are optional and there isn't much gate keeping like before.
It's like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone's who's "about it" is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you'll probably never hear of.
There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people's media consumption.
For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.
In some ways it's a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).
This 100%. Just because capitalism makes streaming unethical doesn't mean we need to go back to old studio system of other capitalist bastards to serve as gatekeepers of art.
[glances at shelf in corner]
Can confirm.