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Saturday, March 12, 2005

I wanted to say something more about Magnatune today, since I bought two albums from them. First, I have to say that the price was right. At £4 per album (about $8 USD), I could have purchased them with change I have laying around the flat. I started to feel guilty about listening to so much music from their site because I kept saying to myself that I could afford to buy it. This is completely different than the feeling when I go to the Virgin Megastore on Princes Street. There, I have to pay between £15 to £25 depending on the artist. These kinds of prices give me the "ah screw it" attitude towards buying CDs. I do not want to pay that kind of money. I think it is the "hey, I can afford this" feeling that will get people to buy music.

The payment process was quite simple. Just click on the "buy" link next to the album you want. Then enter your credit card details and click on the download button in the bottom right. Then you get a user name and password (they are generally the same), which will work on that album for 60 days. Then a myriad of downloading choices greets you. You can either download the entire album or just single songs. I would just download the entire album because of the price and I would set aside some time to do the download because I would recommend downloading the FLAC file, which is quite large in size (I have a 1 megabit connection and it took two hours). The FLAC file comes in a .zip file which you need to have something like Winzip installed to get it to work right. Then when you are done downloading then you unzip the file and it goes into a folder with the artist's name.

One of the big things, I think anyway, is the iTunes AAC files, which you can download after you have purchased your music. I do not know the connections between iTunes and the iPod are but I am pretty sure that you can take iTune files and put them on your iPod. With the iPod taking a huge share in the portable music department, having interoperability with the iPod is big thing and I think that they should market this more than I have seen (although, I could be mistaken).

With the price set right and without Digital Rights Management crippled files, I think Magnatune is on the forefront of the newest and best in music.


posted by Chris  #3:37 PM | 0 comments |