My buddy Michael called yesterday. He’s spent the better part of two days trying to clean up his 15–year-old niece’s spyware-infested computer. (Kazaa, of course. You had to ask?) He thought he finally had it cleaned up, only to discover that some of the crud had returned, and then the PC decided it didn’t even want to boot into Windows anymore. What should he do?
“Easy,” I say. “Reformat the sucker and start over. The kid’ll lose some data files, but nothing that she can’t re-create or replace.”
But it turns out to be more complicated than that. Seems that the niece had downloaded a large collection of iTunes tracks at 99 cents a pop, and Uncle Michael thought, rightly, that she might not want to lose several hundred dollars’ worth of music. No, she never backed them up. And no, she never burned them to CD. In other words, she’s just like a gazillion other people.
But can’t she download them again? I mean, she’s already paid for them, right? Imagine my surprise when I did a little research and discovered the sordid truth about music downloads.
The iTunes Music Store support site says if you lose it, you’re S.O.L.
When you buy a song or album from the iTunes Music Store, you are entitled to download it a single time. If you want to download it again, you must purchase it again.
Whoa. That sucks. Are all online music services like that? I decided to check.
The RealPlayer Music Store FAQ has an equally harsh answer to the What if I lose my music? question:
RealNetworks will not be responsible for refunding or replacing tracks or albums purchased through the RealPlayer Music Store if your system crashes or if you lose or delete your music files. Your downloaded music files are your responsibility. We recommend archiving your files to CD.
MSN Music says they might, might, help you out if you lose your music:
MSN is not responsible for lost downloads, and you should always ensure that you maintain a current backup of your music. MSN Support can replace lost downloads only under certain circumstances such as the crash of your computer’s hard disk drive. If you feel you have encountered circumstances that warrant a replacement of one or more of your purchased tracks please contact MSN Support for further assistance.
With Napster.com, on the other hand, you don’t need to beg. If your hard disk crashes, you can…
Sign into Napster on a secondary computer and use the Sync/Restore feature to download tracks you’ve already downloaded or purchased on another computer.
Too bad Napster tracks are only 128Kbps. Which, in a nutshell, is the problem with music downloads. At 128Kbps or 160Kpbs, the tracks you download contain only a fraction of the information originally recorded by the artist. Producers and engineers slaved to make those tracks sound great. If you sit down in a room with a decent (not great, just decent) audio system and do an A-B test with a CD and an MP3 download, you’ll hear the difference. Even in my car, where listening conditions are less than optimal, I can tell a real CD from an MP3 rip. You don’t need to be an audiophile snob, either; anyone who pays attention can tell that something’s missing from the MP3 or WMA copy. And yet the music services want you to pay at least $9.99 per album for this inferior product.
Well, I won’t do it. Not when I can buy the real deal for pretty close to the same price. The secret? Buy your CDs second-hand. Amazon.com has a thriving market in used CDs, and the prices in many cases are at least as good as downloading them. Today, for instance, I listened to three albums on Napster’s new Napster to Go service, which gives you unlimited access to an enormous library (they claim it’s a million tracks, and I believe it). The monthly fee is $15, and in the last month I’ve probably sampled 50 albums – something I could never have done with the 99–cents-a-song services. Today, I decided to buy a few of those CDs, so I went over to Amazon.com and found:
- John Prine, Live on Tour – $9.88 used at Amazon.com
- Roy Rogers and Norton Buffalo, R&B – 3 “like new” copies for $7.99 or less
- Green Day, American Idiot – 80 used copies for sale, five of them for $9.00 or less
Amazon collects the payment and guarantees satisfaction. Shipping is a flat $2.49 per CD. Those three CDs, shipping included, cost me about $11.50 each, which is only a buck and a half more than I would have paid Apple or MSN or Real or Napster for a second-rate download. I can take the “real” CD and burn a CD-R copy to play in the car (no worries about the CD getting scratched or stolen). I can rip it to a high-bit-rate copy and play it through my Media Center PC anywhere in the house. At 192Kbps or 256Kbps, the quality of my digital copies is more than good enough, and way better than those downloads. And I don’t have to be paranoid about backing them up.
I don’t own a single DRM-restricted track, but I do download some digital music. The Live Music Archive has an incredible collection of free, legal music available in lossless format (SHN or FLAC). I can buy CDs, also in lossless format, from groups like Yonder Mountain String Band. All those downloads, when burned to CD, produce a copy that is indistinguishable from the original source. So tell me again why should I settle for an inferior digital copy that I can’t use or copy freely?
Thomas Hawk says he feels the same way:
Buying a track with DRM appeals even less to me than the screwed up music I get with Kaaza. This is why I still go out and buy my own CDs and rip them myself into crystal clear, properly meta marked, DRM free, high bit rate .mp3 files. In my opinion, this still is the best way to go for the serious music collector.
So does Microsoft’s Matt Goyer.
Update: Tristan Louis came to the same conclusion but for different reasons.
Another update: In the comments, Serge reminds me that I ignored two excellent music services that aren’t so restrictive: eMusic (192Kbps VBR MP3 downloads, with no copy restrictions and the right to re-download) and Disclogic, whose selection neatly mirrors my admittedly offbeat tastes. I’ll have more to say about both companies later. Thanks, Serge!
Ed Bott 
You could ‘solve’ one of the problems by using a DRM-stripping tool on the files bought from iTunes. But it obviously won’t solve the problem of poor sound quality associated with the low bitrate. The irony is that some of the files on file trading networks are of much better quality than those available from the online stores.
I have recently purchased a few titles from Canadian Music retailer, PureTracks.com. Puretracks does allow me to download my music again, and different titles have different restrictions. According to what I see on the site, some may not even allow burning to CD or copying to a portable device.
I do not necessarily believe that a company should allow you to freely redownload items that have been purchased. Traditional stores will not give you a new CD if you scratch yours. However. with the cost of storage and bandwidth what it is, I do believe that they sites should offer a premium service (an additional 10c/song?) to allow further downloads.
I was looking for two songs that I did not want to purchase an entire album for. While I did get them, I have been unable to transfer the music to my second computer. It’s a good thing I had a coupon so did not have to pay full price!
CDs arguably are better in terms of sound quality than downloads, although Apple’s AAC format comes closer than MP3. However, good quality downloads allow you to pick and choose the songs you want off of any given CD. How often do you like every song on an album? As to losing your music if your HD becomes fried – if there are people by now who don’t back up, well, what can you say?
If I CD gets broken, or scratched, the music company will not replace it. Similar, really. In either case one can–as they should with any important data–back up. With hard drives running under $1 a GB, this is not a huge deal. Likely most of those CDs on Amazon folks bought, MP3ed, then resold, which is a bit like pirating, really.
Funny, I posted almost the same thing last night:
http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/Blog/cns!1pG4qKNdtRA5Nl-UhvZI_1rQ!999.entry
I have been giving Napster To Go a whirl this morning, and it seems to be pretty decent. The control built into WMP seems to hang every once in a while for no reason – but the fact that I can sample full albums and take them with me on my smartphone might just get me to keep paying.
I agree that I much prefer buying a full CD of my favorite bands. It’s better quality, I can do anything I want with it (no DRM), and if I did get tired of it, I can always sell it back to a used music store.
However, other than burning songs to CD there’s one other very easy way your buddy Michael could have prevented his dilemma of losing his daughters iTunes collection. Use Mac in the first place! No viruses to worry about! And a much better user experience overall.
Does the guy’s neice have an iPod with autosync turned on? If so, those tracks are on the iPod. While iTunes does not directly allow moving tracks from the iPod to a PC (to make copying harder), there are third-party applications available that will move the songs back to the computer. Try:
http://www.thelittleappfactory.com/software/ipodripwin.php
Both eMusic and Disclogic allowed me to re-download tunes I needed. In a personal profile area on the eMusic web site, a subscriber can find links to all albums he had purchased from eMusic (with very few exceptions).
We had a harddrive die on us a year or so ago. We replaced the harddrive and transferred the songs from the iPod back to the computer. We didn’t lose a thing.
For the girl with the PC that won’t start up:
Get a second hard drive. Install Windows on it. Launch Windows from it. Copy over the old drive’s iTune’s music into the new hard drive. Authenticate your computer on iTunes. Voila! Your music plays again.
Lesson: whenever you download music, it’s yours. But you have to back it up on to another drive or CD.
Great article. I tried to use the Trackback URL to link your site, but got an error message.
Anyway, I referenced your site and hopefully any of my readers will get to it.
Regards
David Harper
Work: david.harper2@mcchord.af.mil
Home: MedSGM@comcast.net
Blog: http://echo9er.blogspot.com
What happens when you scratch your CD beyond repair? Do you get a new CD from the record label? No. Yes, its your music. No, you don’t get extra copies of it. Its the purchaser’s responsibility to care for the product.
Maybe Apple should better advertise the fact that you can create data backups of your music using iTunes. I would agree with that.
The underlying problem here isn’t the music, its Windows. Spyware, viruses, etc…but thats another argument isn’t it?
I prefer half.com for buying CDs.. The prices are better than Amazon.
You’re a man after my own heart, Ed. Thanks for shining a light on this. I have yet to purchase any music from the iTMS (though I did download a bunch of the speeches from the RNC last summer-they were free, so I don’t feel bad about it. 🙂 )
My primary quibble with Napster is this: the music only lasts as long as you keep paying the bill. You stop paying, the music self-destructs.
I confess that I had not considered the possibility of using Napster’s all-you-can-eat as a way to find new music. Not so useful for me, since a) I’m on a Mac and b) I grok Usenet, which IMO is a vastly larger resource where I’m more likely to find unusual new (to me) music.
There is no substitute, however, for owning the original material. I make a point of buying as many albums as I can when I find a band or performer I like. And I buy a LOT of CDs. 🙂
In response to retailers not replacing scratched CD’s:
The point of digital music stores, in my opinion, is to be more convenient than brick and mortar stores. I can understand why traditional retailers don’t replace damaged CD’s. There is a real cost involved in replacing a physical disk; it is a tangible thing that had to be manufactured.
Digital music files, on the other hand, can be replicated indefinitely. The only cost to the e-tailer is in bandwidth, which should be adequately covered anyway, especially in an all-you-can-eat model.
In fact, I think e-tailers have more responsibility in helping consumers obtain replacements, since they place incredibly tight restrictions on copying in the first place. I don’t want to use up one of my authorized copies as a backup copy when I may have a flash-based player for exercising, a hard disk player for trips and my stereo mp3 player.
Also, the average computer is nowhere near as reliable as the average CD player. I’ve used CD players from the mid-to-late 80’s that function just fine. I doubt I have computer hardware in my junk bins that old. I’ve replaced my computer at least 3 times since 1997. CD players also rarely, if ever, eat CD’s. Computers corrupt data all the time. The e-tailers aren’t necessarily responsible for this, but computer manufacturers and software houses certainly are.
If the DRM is closely tied to my hardware configuration, how much of my machine has to stay original? If my computer crashed because of a bad motherboard and hard disk and that kills the DRM then it doesn’t matter if I made backups, since they are useless anyway.
iTunes Music Store must know what I bought, and it is already storing all of the music files, so there would be no additional cost in disk space to allow me to re-download as needed.
The real answer is that DRM just doesn’t work. It is inconvenient for consumers, and if made simple for consumers, it adds overheard to companies to track what consumers are doing. I say, have the music industry provide superios product (e.g. FLAC) and watermark it. If you are in possession of a watermarked file but can’t prove you bought it, then steps should be taken. And let me do whatever I want with my FLAC file on my devices. Signatures are easier to use and harder to remove then DRM anyway.
You know, there is an option that doesn’t cost anything but time. I used to go to the library and check out CD’s and copy to cassette tape (before CD Burning was affordable enough for everyone). The result is a FREE CD that can be copied/ripped and returned to the library.
Not to dig an old story back up but…
I don’t want to buy CDs ‘cos I may just only want one song from it. That is why I want to download my music through an online store (I Hope that they provide good, 24hr, quick service which also doesn’t let me down by saying “we don’t let you redownload”…).
I’m still looking for such an online store. IF anyone knows anything? Please, tell me.
There are several options to improve on 128KBps mp3, most already listed.
Firstly any CD’s I really like which I own can be ripped. If I’m ripping to MP3 (which I often do for compatibility reasons), I use bit rates of 256 or 320 KBps, where file compression impacts very little on the sound (I am a musician who records and engineers projects on the side, I may not have “golden ears” but consider my hearing to be above average. If it’s just for my computer, I rip to 256 KBPS Ogg Vorbis files, which allow the improved sound and the files are 15-20% smaller than mp3, plus as there are no licensing fees for Ogg Vorbis, the format is risk free. I use CD-Tag for this, for a small fee it can rip mp3, wma, aac, ogg vorbis, mp3 vbr, FLAC lossless etc in a multitude of bit rates. CD-EX is good for free to encode mp3.
I do download some music from puretracks.com – Most of their catalogue is encoded at 192 KBps .wma DRM, they do allow you to redownload lost files for a certain period. I have 2 albums downloaded from Puretracks encoded at 320 KBps – the problem is though, that they DON’T TELL YOU what the bitrate is, so I also have one or two files at 128 KBPS which is noticably lacking in high end and bass. As the service grows it seems they are cost-cutting, as they once boasted that ALL files were encoded at 192 KBps or higher.
The library option is a good (if not legal) method. Of course, I have heard of people who go with a ‘shopping list” to their library, listen to it, rip the album or tracks they like to mp3 and then file share. Copyright protection in the last 2 years or so is making this option increasingly redundant.
As for “get a Mac” – I use Macs and PC’s and see positives in both systems. It seems like a last resort trade-off to spend a fortune on a new Apple computer when a few precautions, BACK-UP Data, using Firefox instead of IE, running 2 or 3 bona-fide anti-spywares/anti virus such as Webroot Spysweeper, Spybot, Pest Patrol etc. and keeping them updated, keeping firewall tight and NEVER installing anything without fully reading the EULA, even if it is 20 pages long. And if Apple can translate their IPOD success into selling more PC’s, you can be sure that virus and spyware writers will start producing nasties that hit the Macs. Mac OSX and Linux offer less threat from spyware/viruses mostly down to the fact that they are in much lesser abundance than Windows, rather than having a totally superior design (yes, Windows sucks, XP sucks less than before but still sucks) – Like the Betamax vs VHS war, Betamax was superior quality but VHS was marketed better, hence became the standard platform.
I have a similar strategy as Ned when it comes to navigating the digital music waters. I have fallen in love with emusic though. The price, quality, service, and file rights offered by emusic are by far the best of any of the digital stores so far. The only problem with emusic is their limited selection. While I have found music to download for years to come and they keep adding more goodies, there are many major label albums/artists they just can’t offer. Before I knew the full details I used to go to MSN music but I’ve been enlightened and I refuse to pay 99 cents for a crappy sounding strings attached, protected file, (which won’t even let me transfer itself back to my computer once I’ve transfered it to my player- that in particular really pisses me off!) and this seems to be the standard offered by every other digital music store that I’ve come across. The Napster subscription would almost be cool, if they weren’t offering pathetic sounding 128 kbps files (What are these companies thinking?!!!). So untill a mainstream version of emusic arrives on the market,(I’m not holding my breath) I’ll continue to buy used cd’s of the albums I can’t get from emusic, rip them, burn them, back them up, and then trade them back in to the used music stores which minimizes future cost and provides me with the false sense that my music addiction is supporting itself.
http://www.allofmp3.com
This is, without doubt, the premier site for a myriad of reasons. For starters, the site is Russian, and therefore not subject to the same DRM laws. This allows them to charge roughly $1 per album, or about a dime per track. I have spent appx. $80 for about 50 CDs’ worth of high bitrate files.
That’s my next point – you can choose between 128, 192, and near-audiophile 320 kbps. I love this.
For those worrying about their credit cards in the hands of a Russian processor, the payments are processed by Chronopay, which is a very responsible company (sort of the the PayPal of the EU). I have been using them for one year with no probs).
Seriously, folks – even at the highest bitrate (320), you’re still only paying about a quarter per track. And the selection is VAST. Everyone I’ve turned on to it is a fiend for it, now.
Just thought I’d pass this along!
May I suggest allofmp3.com
This site charges by the mb and offers a choice of quality settings and compression right up to lossless, without any DRM. An album at 192kbs costs around $1.20 and 320kbs less than $2.
They have a larger catalogue than iTunes or any other online music store I’ve come across and have the current UK and US top 100 albums as well as countless film soundtracks, and an enormous back catalogue covering virtually all tastes.
I have used them for time with no problems whatsoever.
Hey, I’m new to the world of ripping and burning, and I have a huge cd library that I’m attempting to transfer to my recently purchased laptop, but I’m finding that some of my cd’s won’t transfer. Any thoughts/suggestions?
Kevin, that’s usually a sign that your drive is dirty or out of alignment. Take the same CDs and try ripping them on another computer. If it works, then you can confirm that your laptop drive needs servicing.