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Are you nuts? They want a dollar a pop for MP3 crap! I let my kids use Kazaa and I put socket filters in our router and installed virus software.
Apple's online music service got off to a good start with music fans. Have you used this service or any of the others to download music legally?
I will not pay to download a lossy-compressed song just to find out if it is the one I am looking for. By the way, if the song was one that I was looking for, I would then go out and purchase the CD (or better yet, the SACD); if it wasn't, I would just make note and delete the download. Some online vendors, such as Buy.com, have little snippets you can listen to over the Internet. This is helpful, but some of the snippets are too short to get to the "heart" of the song. When truly fast (>200 Mb/sec)Internet connections are affordably and widely available and when high-rez multichannel downloads are available, then I will subscribe to a music download service.
I am on dial-up service, with no intention of spending another nickel on computer related anything until absolutely necessary. When the music industry gets its collective act together, and the sound quality is there, and the price is right, I will consider it. Until then, you will still find me hunched over every box of used records I come across.
The only online subscription service I like right now is RealOne's Rhaspody service. The selection is impressive, the UI intuitive, and the "instant on" playback experience without huge downloads is compelling. If they upped the sound quality and allowed easy 79¢ permanant adds to my library (like I-tunes does), it would be near perfect.
No. Why should I pay for a low quality format that also costs me money for net time and dial-in, when, if I like the music enough, the price of a CD is fine? I personally hope music downloading fails, and they get to the core issue of CD prices.
Legal, heck I haven't even tried one of the "illegal" services. I did download and burn to CD a few Grateful Dead concerts. The sound was passable, but certainly nobetter than the fifth generation tapes in my collection. As for the for-pay download services, let's see: I can download a low-fi MP3 for about the same price the song costs on CDonly with the CD, I get liner notes, better looking graphics on the disc, a whole collection of songs with a single easy purchase, AND industry-standard quality sound. For some discs I can even get an SACD for about the same price. Hmmmmm, so hard to decide.
Why download compressed versions of any music? What purpose does it serve? This completely baffles me. I have a friend who has an I-POD and he always brags about how much free music he has. Whoop-tee-doo! It sounds like, well I can't use that word here, but that's how it sounds. For me, it's all about the quality, not the quantity.
Not interested. However, to quote Mark Knopfler, "It's what it is now." Today's teens play all of their music on their computers or MP3 portables. The idea of a teen sitting between two speakers and listening to quality audio is incredulous. Sad that this quality has been lost on future generations.