A Man Walks Into The MP3 Store

A couple of years ago I started to buy music again and as you might have seen from the links I share Bandcamp is my MP3 store of choice. While Bandcamp is the best option for artists, not everything is available there and my alternative is iTunes.

It's weird to say this because I was using Apple Music and Music.app for so long, but the UX to buy music got so bad. Apple really wants you to rent the music instead of buying and it takes an extra click every time to get to the iTunes page to buy an album and then you have to get the files out of the Music folder and sometimes the ID3 tags for one or two songs are missing¹ and the cover is never baked into the file. Overall buying music from iTunes is just a worse experience and in addition it feels like it could go away at any moment, so I was looking into alternatives and, oh person, it does not look great out there.

In the table below you can see a couple of albums that I looked up on various platforms with the corresponding price. I looked up albums from four different eras: very recent (2024), streaming era (2015-2022), CD era (90s), and pre-CD era (before 1980). I checked each album on Bandcamp, iTunes, 7digital, Qobuz and Amazon.

Before I say anything else, I want to repeat taht when an album is available on Bandcamp you should always buy it on Bandcamp! If you buy music instead of streaming it you probably want to support artists and Bandcamp, even under the new ownership, still pays artists the most money and the first Friday of each month is still Bandcamp Friday where all the money goes to the artist.

When I looked at the prices I was not expecting so much fluctuation and differences in prices across various services and that there is not a cheap and a premium option. It really depends on the album which store is the cheapest. Usually either iTunes or Amazon had the best price, but with quite huge differences. For example, Letting off the Happiness by Bright Eyes is €4.99 at Amazon, but €8.99 at iTunes, while Horses by Patti Smith is €6.99 at iTunes and €10.32 at Amazon. Anyway, I try to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money and I will continue to ignore Amazon, even if they are the cheapest option.

Qobuz is directed towards audiophiles and their high prices reflect that. They also have a streaming service and members can buy music for a reduced price, which is always the price they feature prominently on their website and you need to click on the price to get the real price, which is very often the highest one. It's owned by a French company, some kind of media conglomerate, I don't know, their about page says nothing in so many words.

Next up is 7digital, which was a MP3 store, but now is also some kind of B2B music licensing company from the UK. It still has that MP3 store, but I was not able to find all the albums, which is either because they don't sell them or their search is bad 🤷‍♂️ Their prices are usually somewhere in the middle and sometimes they match the best price.

I want to mention two more MP3 stores: jam.coop and Mirlo. Both are worker co-operatives, but their catalog is very limited and I could not find anything I wanted to buy there. I will keep an eye and see if their catalogues are continuing to grow.

If I missed a MP3 store please let me know on Mastodon or via email.