First, a qualification: good as in audio quality, not musical content. The latter is subjective, the former is absolute.<\/p>\n
I’m stuck in the middle of everything.<\/p>\n
I’m not a parasitic downloader\/filesharer who amasses stuff for free just because I can. I’m not an iTunes\/Apple slave. I don’t have a Spotify account. I am familiar with The Pirate Bay<\/a>. I appreciate excellent audio quality. DRM offends me. I don’t buy CDs anymore (I’d just rip ’em and sling ’em). I do have a high-end hard-disk music system (squeezebox<\/a>) with all my old CDs rippled to FLAC<\/a> format. I do not listen to compressed crap, mp3 AAC et al. I want to download top<\/em> quality music on my<\/em> terms.<\/p>\n and,<\/p>\n I want to support musicians.<\/p>\n So here’s the deal: I want a lossless audio format that I can download.\u00a0 And I want to pay for it. I better repeat that, I WANT TO PAY FOR IT!<\/strong> But I can’t because the only option available to me is to download crappy mp3 format or give my first born to Apple. No thanks.<\/p>\n Here’s how it works: I often have Radio Paradise<\/a> playing around my house through 3 squeezebox players, and whenever I hear a tune that I really like I jump on the artist’s website and check to see if I can buy their offerings in FLAC format. 99.99% of the time the answer is no. The 0.01% was today when I checkout out Blackstratblues<\/a>. Clicked on Download, selected FLAC format – followed a link sent via email – downloaded their entire album (which is excellent) in 10 mins, then followed up their invitation to make a contribution to the band and fired off \u00a35. Now that’s how it should work – the artists being rewarded directly for making great music. Nice.<\/p>\n