My girlfriend's Father was like that, and then he died suddenly one day. They were moving to Israel post soviet breakup, and needed money, and they literally could not give away the thousands and thousands of rubles of music that nobody was interested in, and had to leave it in the bin.

Thats a sad story :(

According to the chart in the article, that retail CD you pay $10 for gets the artist $0.30. They'd be much better off if you pirated it and then bought some merchandise from them.

Giving an artist 30 cents is already better. If making a dollar = playing a song 3500 times. That means that I can not possible listen to my most favorite artist enough to give them 1 dollar EVER. Maybe in my entire life. If they self-publish and I buy just 5 songs from them, I already did better than Spotify, and spotify gave me so much more. Spotify appears to be worse off because using Spotify its "free" and I have even less incentive to buy the real track.

tl;dr I could not agree with smackfu/article more, just pirate everything and donate $5 directly to your favorite artist, you already made them more money than spotify ever would for you. And your conscious is clear.

Well, it was linked to from the article. Here's the specific url: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...

How a retail CD works out for the artist actually varies pretty widely, according to that chart. An album sold on CDBaby will net the artist a bit over 7.5x as much as an iTunes album download. A more traditionally-distributed CD nets anywhere between a few cents more on the high end to under a third as much on the low end.

I think more and more people are starting to do this, but there it takes some time for people to adjust their consumption habits. Right now people are still thinking about mp3 only, but this will shift as we have more buying options.

Just curious: Have you considered iTunes or other high-quality digital music sources? I've heard that most people can't distinguish 256kbps AAC from CD quality.

I also buy physical CDs and it has nothing to do with quality. It's because I can usually get the CD used for cheaper than I can get the digital music. I'm also a whole album listener over individual tracks on random.

You have to personally test that. (You should obviously do a blind test. When I did this I didn’t go all out and fired up R, but some statistical analysis would certainly not be overkill.) I can’t tell them apart but other people might.

It would be absurd, though, for me to buy CDs over AAC files because of the audio quality. Additionally to the indistinguishable audio quality I get a better price (I guess I’m paying about one third less on average), instant delivery wherever I am and the music is nice and compact. I don’t have to deal with boxes full of CDs.

Streaming doesn’t fit the way I listen to music (nor are any great streaming services available in Germany). I like my curated music collection.

The Foobar2000 ABX plug-in can do this for you. It automatically sets up a blind test, and calculates the probability that you can tell the difference between.

http://www.foobar2000.org/components

In my experience, that depends heavily on both the listener and the music. Rock and pop music, which cram everything into the midrange, compress well. But music which strays further into the treble and bass doesn't. Even when a difference shows up, whether it's noticeable is going to depend on who's listening.

The most noticeable example I can think of offhand is the David Bowie album Outside - there are a few spots where entire tracks drop out in 256kbps AAC. However, they consist of the kind of very high-pitched sounds that are the first to go when your hearing degrades, so a lot of listeners won't miss them because they never knew they were there in the first place.

I do own AAC tracks and they are fine, but if I'm going to buy an AAC track - I'd rather have the physical CD.