25/03/25 - the absolute state of the (digital) music industry

so, i've been working on clearing my life of subscriptions, and for the most part it's been much easier than i expected.

the one major thing that's really been sticking has been music.

i tried (for a very short time) and gave up to find anything open source that had decent streaming. of course there wasn't such a thing, as i realised fairly quickly after thinking about it for more than a couple seconds.

so the other option, then, was to buy my music outright, and just listen to mp3s the old school way, rather than doing streaming.

this is my current solution, and it would be great...if only it was easy to buy the music i like.

it's easy when, and only when, the artist has their music on bandcamp.

the other major platforms for buying mp3s seem to be qobuz, 7digital, amazon music, and itunes.

qobuz would be great, even despite the fairly high prices, if they allowed me to use their platform at all. unfortunately, apparently neither my country nor my vpn are welcome there, and so that's a dead end.

7digital would be great; i got all the way to the checkout, only to see that they only accept paypal. frustrating, but i figured it was worth digging up my old paypal account to buy the music legitimately. but lo and behold, paypal error, and "please try again later". ah well.

itunes isn't great; although i've seen it touted as having the widest selection of music available, i really don't want to be giving apple more money. the whole point of leaving the subscription based services is to be less dependent on big tech, and going back to it is not what i wanted. however, for just one album, i figured i could be flexible, and buy from them.

well guess what, you can't without downloading their app. screw that.

amazon is in something of the same boat, and while i haven't tried it yet, i'm just really not thrilled about going back there again.

contact me at: tsukaj@tilde.club