@ LuckyStrike - many sites now offer a download service outside of iTunes. Amazon is one, Play is another - you can buy the single tracks you like or the whole album. It's also cheaper than buying the physical CD most of the time. I just bought an album which is only available as an import from the US via Amazon MP3 Downloader (which is free and very quick to download - no endless updates and extra crap like iTunes) for less than half the price of the CD itself which would have been very expensive.
I think more companies are aware of the digital age, as it were, and offer alternatives to having to buy a physical product when a digital one not only makes it cheaper for the consumer but also those making and distributing them in the first place. iTunes no longer dominates the market as it once did.
Try finding CD's I like here without a huge shipping fee due to being sent from half way across the world. You could easily end up paying £25 for a CD, and like £40 for one bloody vinyl. I'd use Amazon or other places but absolutely none of them offer a lossless service, and if I pay for music, I want the product they released - not lossy versions of them.
This is why I wish artists used
www.bandcamp.com more because you can choose the damn codec to download with and stream the whole album on the page itself. It's incredibly useful. Also, all the money goes to the band, not the damn label.
Also I'm all for illegal downloads of music if you consider buying something if you like it, which I do. Or at the very least, donate to bands when you can't afford their CD due to outrageous shipping costs (again, which I do very often). You can cry "it's stealing" all you like, but you can copy over files over and over and over again, and it won't cost you anything - so millions of people downloading still only really acquaints to 1 person downloading it in terms of cost for the manufacturers. Which is what the majority of the cost for a CD should be anyway. A general CD is about a tenner nowadays, do you really think it costs even quarter of that to make? They could get away with selling CD's a lot cheaper than they do.
I understand with the bands I like due to, again, outrageous shipping costs - in which I have no issue with downloading a lossless version of it (from a source I won't mention
) and just donating a fiver to the band. Not once did they ever complain at that, in fact, they were thrilled to see someone was actually listening to their music and willing to contribute in a way that goes directly to the band rather than to their record label. In a way, buying CD's actually funds what I hate about music if I buy from a mainstream record label, so I never contribute to major record labels.
It's a bit of a tl;dr but if you're interested in the subject
I suggest you read this. It's a good and in-depth view on my standpoint on "illegal downloads".
