An Ideal Transaction: "Nil Recurring"

By this I mean my ideal vision of getting music in the future was pretty much crystallized in my experience yesterday by purchasing "Nil Recurring" by Porcupine Tree.  Available as either MP3 or FLAC (more $$ for this option), no DRM, direct from the band's website, including artwork.  You can buy the FLAC (I did) and rip to whatever bitrate/codec you want and stick it on your portable music player of choice, and/or you can burn to CD and use the artwork to make a nice physical copy of the work.  Kudos to SW and the rest of the band for making this happen.  The EP sounds great!

I suppose the recent announcement by Radiohead falls along the same line, but even more radical with it's optional pricing scheme.

If I could get all my music this way, I would.  Until then, I'll still stick primarily with buying CDs.

What is FLAC?

This is a nice, convenient way to go about things, but this is still overpriced for a download.  I still believe $0.99 per song is a lot, even if it goes directly to the artist.

Man Overboard wrote: My ideal transaction wouldn't involve it costing over 12USD to download an EP

The price was steep, but I blame the weak dollar.  It was selling for 5 pounds - there was a time when that would be about 6 or 7 bucks, which wouldn't be terrible for an EP.  Of course since there are 4 tracks, you're right that a good price would have been ~ $1/track.

Edit:  I'm sorry, the MP3 download is 5 pounds, the FLAC is 6.  But the dollar is still weak - the FLAC costs $10.45. 


Edited by NaturalScience - October 09 2007 at 10:07