Flashes of Panic

Moving last year finally made me think, hey, not only is there a lot of music on all those CDs, but they weigh a lot. And there’s a lot of plastic there. I’ve been buying a lot more of my music online since then, largely through the iTunes music store. But I still buy some CDs, and there’s a good reason for that.

There’s a ton of good music available at no cost online, both legally and illegally. It’s frightfully efficient to distribute digital music that way, and despite the RIAA’s bizarre and backwards policy of suing its own customers, that seems to be where things are headed. It removes the necessity of using a lot of paper, plastic, and gasoline to distribute the music, and in many cases it removes the necessity of dealing with layers of music-business bureaucracy between musicians and their audience.

However, it also removes the flow of compensation returning to the musicians from their audience, and we haven’t really come up with an online model which replaces that flow. ITMS purchases don’t send much cash back to the musicians, unfortunately, less than a CD sale, but even before the internet, the most lucrative sale a musician could make was selling their own CDs at concerts, with a minimum of middlemen.

With that in mind, if I know someone has a new release and they’re coming to town soon, I’ll often wait (as I did last week with Kathleen Edwards’ new disc) and buy the CD at the concert. It costs me a bit more, but I can hope to get more music from them in the long run.

Now Playing: The Cheapest Key from Asking For Flowers by Kathleen Edwards

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