This might come as a shock, but CDs can contain DRM too..

Yeah they usually do... but you know... so do blurays, but I'm still going to rip them for my personal library. :P

Those are vanishingly rare, especially since the Sony rootkit fiasco, and easy to spot as any audio disc that contains copy protection is not permitted to use the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo since they do not conform to the Red Book specs.

True, but do you really think the average consumer is going to pay enough attention to the packaging of an album to look for such a symbol?

I think it's a moot point, as there were never a significant number of copy protected audio discs produced.

Hmmm? I found myself lately some DRM-Free Albums in Bandcamp (has Flac, MP3 and other formats), of those that interested me. But they are rare, few and extremely niche. No big selections and important stuff. Mostly something like "indie" and from Freelancers, at least from my experience and usage.

The "average consumer" doesn't buy CDs anymore these days. They listen to the radio or spotify.

Yeah Bandcamp has been ok for the instrumental bands I like, but almost nothing else. Quboz has almost every major name I've looked for, though.

Yeah, not enough people care about owning things they purchase. :/

Maybe, but there's also a number of people who don't like the clutter brought about by physical media either.

Granted, as someone who likes having things to touch/etc., the above people are operating on a different frequency of insane but I suppose they think similar about those like myself as well.

I'm quite happy with 7Digital where it comes to buying DRM-free clientless music. My collection is mostly mp3, but if you want FLAC, you can buy that at 7Digital as well and also single tracks for most of it's offers, though price per track is higher when bought single than as part of an entire album. Also, buying FLAC's is more expensive than buying mp3's.

I myself, if I want to listen to lossless music, I don't turn on a (mp3) playlist on my computer, but listen to an audio CD instead. As for playlists, I create them in Windows Media Player and they are permanent. So if I copy-paste my whole Music folder when transmigrating a Windows install, the playlists get transferred as well to the new install (I keep My Music backupped with SyncToy to an external drive).

Some storefronts definitely take advantage and jack up the prices on lossless audio, not to mention the prices for the hi-res stuff. I like Bandcamp's approach in that regard, a flat price for the product - not some screwery based on file formats.

It's actually something I haven't seen a lot of artists discuss at length. While I imagine it takes effort to master/etc. into hi-res than just simply "ok work's done, now to upload the raw .wav and watch the money roll in", I'm still curious about how the decision to price it goes. Of course, at the other end I've seen (and heard, in some cases) plenty of artists talk about how they choose to price the regular stuff.

Oh shit, thanks man! Looks like 7Digital has many of the songs I wanted but couldn't find on Bandcamp or Quboz. :D

Oh I can for sure see that, it's a rough ride building up my library for the first time. After that tough, unless you care to own a LOT of media, you'll only trickle add to it over time. I mean how many people kept paying $15/month to watch The Office on Netflix when you can just buy the damn dvd's? lol. To me I care about ownership, and lately about responsible consumption. I had been paying $60/month for YouTube TV and $15/month for Spotify Premium but realized I listen to like 200 songs repeatedly, and YouTube TV was on for noise 90% of the time. What a waste of money over time! So now I'm buying all the older tv shows, music and movies I like and building a server for home using Emby (probably). Or just direct use from my main PC. For new stuff I buy the episodes (or seasons) on Vudu and later on physical Blu Ray or whatever they decide to release.

Of course what's right for me won't be right for everyone else. I'm ok with not owning physical discs of my songs, an uncompressed file backed up 2 or 3 times is fine for me. I would love if tv shows and movies could just be bought drm free, organized and all ready for me to drag and drop into a hard drive. :P Ripping, labeling and organizing blurays is a pain in the ass. Luckily I don't like many things lol.

Well pfft. I can't tell the difference from MP3 and Flac/WMA/WAV. I compared the sound signature for a song on Audacity, and I could see the differences from MP3 to Flac, but couldn't hear any difference at all. I am using $100 logitech speakers just played through Audacity, though.

So maybe I should just buy Amazon MP3's? I mean Amazon has litterally every song lol -shrug-

I just don't want to buy some nice audio equipment later on in life and realize my library of music could be much better quality. But I also don't feel like a snob, and when I have tried nice audio in public stores in the past, it wasn't a feeling like higher FPS monitors were. With FPS I will never go back, and I want most games to run at 80+ fps or I can tell. With music... it could all be placebo.