What do you use to download music?

Drew wrote: when I download I use Itunes or amazon for mp3's That's rare though- I still like buying CD's for some reason

Well, I can think of a few good reasons for choosing CD's over mp3's

(1) The music on CD's is not compressed ... I think

(2) CD's often come with some booklets and album art to look at.

(3) You can buy thousands CD titles for pennies at your local flea market, whereas for an mp3 album you'll be asked to pay at least 6-7 bucks, but could be twice as much on Amazon. 

(4) You can't accidentally delete, damage or lose data from a CD, unless you do something foolish to it. At the same time, my lady wife had accumulated a gigabyte or two worth of iTunes songs on her Mac when the hard drive quit. Data recovery guys said they could try for $300.00 and "see how it goes". Never again! 

Gerinski wrote: I'm an old-fashioned old fart and I still want to have my music on CD (apart from my many old vinyls) with its artwork, lyrics, credits etc.   I have an mp3 player which is rather crappy and I only use it when I go on some holiday trip, and I surely have some music on my computer but I would not like the idea of having most of my music in a hard drive, I like being able to see it physically, look around the shelves to decide what I'm going to play, and touch it, open the sleeve or case, have a look at the artwork or lyrics while listening. I too have suffered a couple of unrecoverable computer crashes and I am not very disciplined with back-ups.   Playlists may be very handy but I have no problem getting up to change the CD every 50 minutes (I don't even have a CD charger).   I admit having quite some CD-Rs copied from friends original CDs but the vast majority of my collection is undoubtedly original CDs.   I am a smoker and when I think that I spend in a pack of cigarettes nearly the same as what a CD costs, downloading music to save a couple of euros does not make any sense.

Since you mentioned "playlists" ... There is a vast ocean of mass-produced, pre-digested commodity music for entertainment of the broad population. It is engineered to be consumed in any quantities and in any order. The smallest standalone unit of such music is the typical 3-4 minute pop song, while the true quantum is probably the 30-second sample that we can hear in commercials etc. An arbitrary playlist is a handy tool, assisting in consumption of such music.  But, there is nothing wrong with that, as long as you can opt out and choose what I call quality music.  

If you haven't seen this, you may want to sneak a  peek: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrvzgq_steven-wilson-interview-2011-part-1_music, where Steven Wilson is discussing the  playlist/jukebox mentality that has evolved to meet the instant gratification needs of he present day consumer society. 

Now, quality music is best enjoyed as a whole in larger units somewhere in the range of 15-20 to 40-50 minutes, which is the EP to LP length, so that to allow the artistic concept to fully evolve (provided, or course, you like and trust the musician/band/composer).  This way, if you are listening to a vinyl LP, skipping tracks would be both cumbersome AND counter-productive. 

Now, I had a few more thoughts to share on why true lovers of music prefer physical carriers, esp. LP's and R2R tapes (the same way as the avid readers prefer real books to "tablets"), but I must hurry to our local flea market in order to continue my quest of the old vinyl :)