• sunbunman@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    There’s quite a few ways actually:

    • Bandcamp (preferred)
    • just google it
    • Artist’s official website
    • contact artist via social media

    If none of the above has worked, this is no longer an issue about whether you want to pay for the product or not, it’s a supplier problem.

      • sunbunman@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Bandcamp is good for indie artists and if you want to discover new artists. I’ve found quite a few diamonds in the rough on there. A surprising amount of metal / punk artists sell via Bandcamp if you’re into that.

        How is 'just Google it" not a valid option? This is literally how you can find 99% of all problems about the internet especially for finding where to legally buy digital products within the first few websites. You know what is good for business when you’re trying to sell a product? Making sure its one of the first few, if not the first choice the customer gets when looking at the default search engine.

        Moving on from that I’m guessing getting in contact with the artist is not an option? Y’know the other 2 points?

    • avatar@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Can I play devil’s advocate a little bit here, because I was really unaware that this ever worked for anything except indie artists on Bandcamp. So Bandcamp works for them or for discovering new music obviously.

      I didn’t know artists ever sold digital music on their websites, but that does make sense, so I checked - if I google Taylor Swift and go to her website, there it is, digital music purchase. Great.

      I went to U2’s website, and the only music I can buy there is vinyl. I don’t want vinyl, I want digital. You can buy merch, but I’m after music, not merch. Looking further, there’s all sorts of galleries and information about each album and song, but you still can’t buy the music.

      Other mainstream artists I googled didn’t even go that far. Googling them brought up a wikipedia link, social media links, tours. All stuff I don’t want. Now your list has “contact artist via social media” - setting aside the fact that it’s unlikely a popular mainstream artist will even reply to anyone at all about anything, this is a real point of friction. I don’t want to have to contact an artist to find out some alternative way to get their music. If I’m buying something online, there needs to be some way to buy it online and ready to go. If we have to wait a couple of days or weeks for a reply that may or may not come - the process failed.

      If I had to guess, they would probably say something like “it’s on spotify”.

      So yes it probably is a supplier problem, but it seems to me that this is happening for the majority of popular artists if a majority of music people like is mainstream. I assume if you like the majority of indie music then that’s probably not the case.

      • sunbunman@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        No worries, I’ll take your U2 example and try it from my end (I don’t listen to them so I can’t decide on what album(s) specifically you are looking for). I’m going to be frank, it was a pain, but I did find zdigital (7digital outside of Australia) selling their albums without physical media. But getting there, I had to see that the U2 website/publisher website did not even advertise it. It was like the 5th option on duckduckgo after searching for

        u2 digital download

        I’m sure you would have better luck if you slide in the specific album that you were looking for.

        Important to note is that you aren’t googling for that artist or album, you’re googling

        artist album digital download

        I do agree with you that mainstream artists and publishers are going down this route probably due to some deals with streaming services, but unfortunately that is the reality we live in now. Additional work will be required by the consumer to get what they want. If the publishers start completely stopping this at some point all I can say is that I have the disposable income to buy the products I want and I am going to get it. Whether the publishers sell it to me or not is their decision to make.

      • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I suspect that big artists are making so much from streaming that they’re not concerned with direct to consumer. And that’s fine because they are the easiest to torrent.

        Bandcamp or whatever downloads website for small and torrent for big.

    • Flit@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Also, when it comes to specific platforms, Apple Music is quite good, though they make it rather painful to buy music if you use Linux

      • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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        9 months ago

        It is to be noted that while iTunes is DRM-free at this point (which is very nice and surprised me when I found out) it is unfortunately still lossy compressed audio which the perfectionist in me really doesn’t like :P

        Come on Apple, sell me your funny ALAC, you have it for Apple Music anyway

        • averyminya@beehaw.org
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          9 months ago

          It is now? That’s cool Would have been nice to not have lost my entire childhood library because it was locked behind iTunes.

        • Flit@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. It doesn’t bother me that much, since I personally can’t tell the difference in audio quality, but that’s still unfortunate to know