the future of our collections

Quite impressed with Radiohead's challenge to the music industry by allowing people to choose what they want to pay for their downloadable album. This, with the ease of online marketing and relative ease of creating digital music, means that the future looks very different for our music collections. It's not that surprising then that iTunes and other large music distributions (including Gracenote) intend to make the 'digital album' a better package by including not only album art, but sleeve notes, lyrics, etc, so that it makes it worth while getting a legit copy.

In celebration of a more free digital world, I have been downloading tracks from 7digital.com which is my new found shopping place for music, linked to Last.fm (when I say free I refer more to the lack of Stalinist formatting restrictions than to cost). And I've downloaded "Nude" from the Radiohead album, which sounds great and very, well, Radioheadish. The great thing is you can preview the tracks before purchasing, making it quite a pleasure. You're more likely to explore music you wouldn't want to risk by investing in a whole album.

However, one thing to look out for is that the tracks are available Digital Rights Management free - and most of the WMA (Windows) format files are not! (the site tells you the license quite clearly).

Of course if you do find yourself trapped in the stark world of a DRM track you can still write it to CD and then rip it while still keeping very high digital quality (you will need to enter all the MP3 tags yourself if you do this). Every time they try and lock things down at the format level there will be people who find a way to unlock them... you've got to love 'em.