Buying Music in 2025

Recently, I wrote about bandcamp and the dangers of not backing up and why I buy music. In this next of the series, I want get into how I actually get music right now.

A few things before we get started…

First, this is just my options and what I like to do.

Secondly, all of these options offer fully DRM-free music files, no proprietary formats. This isn’t about kracking or anything.

Finally, this isn’t a post about piracy or however you wanna call it.

This is a post about about the ways I spend my money (hopefully as directly as possible to artists) to download music I can use however I see fit, whenever I see fit… i.e., actually buying copies of music.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way let’s talk about

Where I Buy Music

Top Pick Bandcamp

The best way to buy music currently… if they have it.

Format: Too many to choose from (but I recommend FLAC or MP3 320)

The Good:

• (Usually) lets you listen to an album several times before you buy
• Stream your music right from their page… for now
• Big Money to artists
• All the formats you could want
• Excessively HQ files, some even fancy 24-bit

The Bad:

• Very few major artists (but you would be shocked by who you will find)
• Their discovery is ruined these days.

The Ugly:

• Artists can reupload and edit albums after they are published. What version is up now? who knows

Pick #2 iTunes Music Store

Yes, this still exists, but BARELY. You have to open up Apple Music, go to preferences, enable it, then go to the new icon… and GOD FORBID you mistake iTunes Music Store for the Apple Music subscription.

But the quality, selection, and price make it worth the annoyance.

Format: M4A 254

The Good:

• M4A is well supported outside of Apple and has decent quality
• Amazing catalogue with albums and singles impossible to find elsewhere
• The best for international releases I have found

The Bad:

• The tiny preview snippets are embarrassing in 2025
• How Apple puts the album cover isn’t supported anywhere, so I have to fix them all manually.

The Ugly:

• You have to use their “Apple Music.app” which is a tyre fire
• The store is slow and sluggish, and does not have multiple tabs
• lots of download problems requiring several app restarts and re-downloading

Pick #3 Amazon

Format: Variable Bit Rate MP3

The Good:

• Second largest mainstream catalogue to iTunes
• Everybody loves an MP3 file

The Bad:

• Just like Apple, they do everything they can to funnel you to the subscription service
• It can be hard to get to the MP3 pages even when you know what you are doing
• Least quality files off of everything from this list
• Half a dozen clicks to buy and download an album

The Ugly:

• Amazon
• Artist pages cannot tell between multiple artists with the same name.
• When you click play on a track to preview it, it shuffles the current album and plays random tracks

Pick #4 Direct from Artist

This has been such a tyre fire of bad experiences. I really wish I could endorse this more. I really, really want to. But the facts of the matter are that I have bought music from the following artists directly, and only once has it gone well..

1. Gary Numan: No complaints
2. Aphex Twin: More expensive than anywhere else, and charges based on quality
3. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: All files are raw WAVs with no tagging. I had to FLAC and tag myself
4. Nine Inch Nails: paid a massive 100% cost of the album to shipping to pre-order a CD that showed up two weeks after the album came out. And it didn’t even have a jewel case, just a cardboard slip.
5. Lady Gaga: initially never delivered, had to contact support
6. Chance the Rapper: Tracks omitted from the album and renumbered with no disclaimer

Formats: ??? It depends

The good

1. Most money to artists
2. Sometimes the only place to get an HQ version

The Bad

1. Inconsistent with what you get
2. Prices all over the place
3. Buggy app stores
4. Pages sometimes do not say what format you are paying for
5. No preview before listening

The Ugly

1. Incomplete versions of albums
2. Good luck finding anything but the latest album
3. Welcome to a dozen mailing lists

The New Place I am not Sure About: Qobuz

I have bought exactly THREE albums from Qobuz so far to give it a try. One thing I like is that they are claiming to have tonnes of albums from major labels in lossless formats.

To try it out, I bought a Nine Inch Nails album after realizing one of my very old MP3s had a glitch.

Then I found out they have some Orbital singles that are not on Orbital’s Bandcamp.

I am not 100% ready to recommend them, but they might be the pick below Bandcamp, again, if they have it. My issues are that they are the most expensive of all, and I don’t know how aboveboard they are yet.

The Fallback: Used Media

Sometimes you can’t find a digital copy of music for reasons.

Something like Discogs or my local Zia Records suddenly becomes amazing. I can pick up a good “play copy” of an album. Play Copies are used albums that are in good condition, but not good enough to appease a collector.

Then rip it like it’s 2003!

• For Macs try: dBpoweramp
• For Windows: Try Exact Audio Copy
• For command line nerds: Try Whipper

Segue: File Quality

Should anybody care about FLACs or 24-bit audio? Well, I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t want to say everybody should, but I have my reasons.

I prefer FLAC files because they are 1) Uncompressed, 2) An Open format

This means they are of the highest quality I can get, and being an open format means I never have to worry about listening to them because all software can use them freely. The standard and libraries are openly available¹.

I care about having uncompressed, high-bitrate music because when I stream it to my phone or computer, it’s often encoded in formats designed for streaming, like Opus. I would rather have a copy of the original, high-bit-rate, uncompressed version than a copy of a copy with artifacts of artifacts, possibly with more artifacts.

It’s not the biggest thing in the world; I still buy plenty of Amazon’s midaf mp3s and enjoy them. But if I can get better, I will.

Segue the Second: Backups

I brought this up in the last article, but for the love of everything that is holy, don’t only have backups, have tested restores.

Licensing and BS mean that where you bought a file doesn’t mean it will still be there when you come back, because you deleted, mauled, or lost something.

Finally: What about Discovery?

Spotify got popular because it was amazing at shoveling fresh new music into your ears at an astronomical rate.

So what to do?

YouTube is where I check out new music most of the time. They will recommend you lots of stuff; they have great music critics, reviewers, and talking heads, and when you find a song, it will often link to a link tree page that shows all the places you can buy an album or song.

Bandcamp lets you “follow” artists and entire labels to get notified when new music drops, so once I discover a label that puts out music I like, I get all their mailers and new releases.

Many players can “scrobble” all your listening to ListenBrainz. ListenBrainz is a part of a Wikipedia-like service for cataloging music and releases. ListenBrainz can provide you with playlists of recommended music to check out on YouTube or streaming platforms. So far, I really like what it’s been sharing with me. This raises some privacy concerns, but since it’s an open group trying to build an open and free music service rather than drive shareholder value, I have fewer concerns.

Also, having music nerd friends to talk to helps.

Wrapping Up

Whew. This was another big one!

My next and final post in this series is about how I actually self-host my own streaming library, along with some suggestions on how you can do it at all skill levels.