The state of digital music purchases in 2024

19 Apr 2024

Or: how I tried and failed to buy Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Bandcamp is an online music distribution service that's been around since 2007(!). It is also one tough son of a bitch, having somehow survived not one but two acquisitions. And yet it continues to exist in much the same way as it has before.

It's beautiful in its simplicity: a virtual "merch table" for artists and labels to sell their goods. Any music you buy on Bandcamp can be downloaded in the file format of your choice and is yours forever. No DRM, no strings attached.

It flies in the face of how most media is consumed today. People have become used to renting, rather than owning, their movies, TV shows, music and videogames. Ownership of digital media usually comes with many caveats, with DRM being the norm, and ownership only lasting as long as the platform to which is tied exists. The only real ownership comes in two ways: physical media, or, digital media without DRM.

But this isn't just a rant against DRM or subscription services. I want to tell you the story of what happens when you try to do something as simple as buying a digital album.

Recently, I've taken the on habit of using an app called Enso to journal in the morning, before work. For some reason, this habit has become intertwined with a particular album: Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports. From the album's liner notes:

Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to "brighten" the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

It’s these qualities that make it ideal as a writing companion. You can tune into it, or out of it, as your focus shifts from one thought to the next, as you commit more or less to the task of writing. On its own, it's a superb album, and one I've listened to countless times over the years.

My digital music stash sits in cloud storage and is streamed using Plex. My copy of Brian Eno's seminal work isn't the best. Not only is it stored in a lossy format (MP3), but it's been illegally obtained many years ago. For something that I've listened to so many times, I feel like I simply must purchase a legitimate copy. Furthermore, I want to have it in a lossless format.

Hey man, got some files?

I started, of course, with Bandcamp. It actually surprised me to see that Brian Eno is on there in some way.¹ However, the discography is a long way from being complete, and no Ambient 1 in sight.

Searching for Ambient 1 produces dozens, maybe hundreds of results. It only goes to show how many people revere the record. Or at least, how nice of a ring the title has and how effective it is. You know you're getting Ambient music, and that there almost certainly is more from where it came.

The next logical step was to go straight to the source. Step right into the Eno Shop, presumably where one would go for all things Brian Eno. But again, no luck. In spite of its utterly charming <area> based landing page,² the Ambient albums are conspicuously absent from the list.

Time to play a game of Google.³

Lots of (bad, mediocre, compromise-filled) choices

Amazon came up first, but it only offers MP3 downloads. I also want nothing less than to contribute to the existence and success of such an objectively horrible company. You know, any more than I already do.

iTunes was an intriguing one, and turned out to be a bit of a rabbit hole unto itself. There was a small period in the mid-00's where I actually bought into it. It was cheap enough, easier and more reliable than P2P and it just worked with the iPod. Looking back, maybe DRM-infused 256kbps AAC files weren't the best long-term investment. I'd have been better off buying and ripping CDs.⁴ A while back, Apple did start to offer lossless music - but only in Apple Music, their subscription-based streaming service. Also, apparently iTunes music hasn't had DRM since 2009, but charged users to upgrade their purchased songs to DRM-free versions? The entire things is confusing and convoluted, especially when compared to the simplicity of Bandcamp. Plus, ultimately we are still talking about lossy files.

Moving on... I was very excited when I came across a service called Qobuz. This thing has been around since 2007 and I'd somehow never heard about it. It looked just about perfect, very Bandcamp-like:

WHY BUY ON QOBUZ?

Stream or download your music

Buy an album or an individual track. Or listen to our entire catalog with our high-quality unlimited streaming subscriptions.

Zero DRM

The downloaded files belong to you, without any usage limit. You can download them as many times as you like.

Choose the format best suited for you

Download your purchases in a wide variety of formats (FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF...) depending on your needs.

Listen to your purchases on our apps

Download the Qobuz apps for smartphones, tablets, and computers, and listen to your purchases wherever you go.

Sign me up, this is pretty much what I'm after. The end! Thanks for reading.

Except I live in Portugal, and apparently you can't buy any music from Qobuz in Portugal. I looked, and nowhere is this explicitly stated. Here's their article listing supported countries. No mention of certain features or content only being available in certain regions.

Even more frustrating, I could get as far as adding the item to the cart in their online store, but clicking on the shopping cart only boots me back to the streaming-only landing page. So close. I could just try to purchase the album through them using a VPN. But again, that feels like one too many hoops to have to jump through for something that should be simple.

Bleep and Boomkat and both great alternatives to Bandcamp. Well designed, good editorial presence, MP3, WAV and FLAC downloads on a lot of releases. But the coverage is spotty. The closest match I found was this 4xLP bundle of Brian Eno's ambient works - well worth the purchase, but out of stock, and extremely analog.

DIY?

At this point, my options have basically been reduced to⁵:

1. buying the album on CD, plus a CD drive, and ripping it
2. ripping the album from YouTube using a tool like yt-dlp
3. jumping on P2P and grabbing one of the many lossless versions floating out there

All these options have one thing in common: they're illegal. The first option is the only one where the artist would conceivably see any of my money. It's also by far the most time-consuming. If I'm being honest, it's just not going to happen.

Is this the best we can do? Bandcamp should have proven that there is a market for high-quality digital music and a desire for artists and their audience to come closer together. I want to throw as much money as possible at the people making the music that I love. Even someone as well-off (I hope⁶) as Brian Eno. Other artists have proven this kind of approach works at scale (thinking more Radiohead's In Rainbows than U2's Songs of Innocence).

P2P networks prove it too: in them you will find all the music you've ever heard and all the music you never even knew existed, all in FLAC or WAV. It's an audiophile's dream. And if you engage with it you're cutting off artists completely.

So what?

Maybe Brian Eno doesn't care that I grab some FLAC files of an album he released in 1978. However, this feels like a symptom of a larger disease. Streaming has monumentally reduced the overhead for labels, cutting costs in manufacturing and distribution. But these earnings haven't been passed along to the musicians. From Fiona Bevan, speaking to The Guardian on the subject in 2021:

The entire music industry profits from the brilliant, beautiful songs which we walk up the aisle to, hum in the shower, or use to say farewell at the funeral. Yet these songs that soundtrack our lives are vastly undervalued compared with the recordings of the songs. If a singer releases a cover of a hit song, they’ll earn up to 10 times more from it than the writer will. Record labels get about 55% of streaming platform income because they historically had large overheads for their physical products, while publishers only get about 15%. Now that streaming has almost totally replaced CDs and vinyl, songwriters are trying to survive from a percentage of £0.0003 per stream, compared with a percentage of a £1.99 CD single sale, or even a 99p MP3 download. The labels’ physical overheads are vastly reduced, but songwriters are still trapped in this archaic model, ending up with a tiny percentage of the publishers’ 15% by the time everyone else has taken their cut along the way, which is why I recently told the government inquiry that I know hit songwriters who are driving Ubers.

Furthermore, I'd argue that the streaming model has affected the public perception on the value of music. Why pay for a digital copy of an album where you can get all the music for the same value or less? Maybe it's a step up from file-sharing: the most convenient option becoming the legal one. But it's not a model that can sustain a vibrant, diverse musical landscape in the same way that a platform like Bandcamp does.

At the start, I marvelled at Bandcamp's toughness, how it seems to simply continue to chug along. But if there's any lesson to be taken from the Internet, it's that platforms die and disappear. When, not if, it does, what will become of all the bedroom producers, the people who have fought for years to build an audience, who have finally managed to just barely make a living out of their art?

While writing this thing, my mind kept going back to Joan Westenberg's recent article on the creative economy, where she lays it all out in gory detail. In order to survive, long-term, you need to own the platform, own the means of promotion and distribution, and use the standard content platforms as tools to promote your own.

This is a tall order. But maybe, in a world full of self-sustained creators, it might be possible to do something as easy as trading your money for some digital files.

⁂

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