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Now that allofmp3 is no longer available, I don’t know where to buy new music. Allofmp3 was perfect — inexpensive, DRM-free, convenient to download, and it even let me buy music in my favorite non-proprietary format. But alas, such perfection went hand-in-hand with questionable legality, and US users can no longer add money to their accounts.

Since I manage my music collection on a computer, buying music on CD would require tedious additional steps of ripping the music to my hard drive and leave me with an inconvenient physical artifact. The iTunes store isn’t compatible with my computers’ software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod — I refuse to by any kind of DRM’d music, anyway, since DRM means you don’t really own your music. I tried eMusic, which is where I got most of the new songs on this mix, but their selection was constrictingly small, and their pricing scheme (different subscription levels get you different numbers of per-month downloads, that expire at the end of the month) created some perverse incentives. Amazon and Yahoo! sell DRM-free music, but at $1+ a song it’s a bit pricey for me (perhaps the conclusion to this dilemma is that I can’t actually afford to buy much new music!).

Mostly I’ve been listening to Pandora and music I already have lately, but if anyone knows of an alternative place to buy music that doesn’t have the issues outlined above, let me know!

“Free software”, as in “free as in speech”, means the freedom to run the program for any purpose. This means using my music software to play music in the format of my choice; it means owning my media in a format that doesn’t lock me in to using one company’s devices; it means knowing the program will still be useful if the original creator stops supporting it or changes it in harmful ways.

Avoiding the “Sorry, dad” scenario described in this article that describes, albeit from a different perspective, many of the reasons I’ve transitioned from a Mac geek to fairly anti-Apple (similar reasoning articulated very well by Mark Pilgrim) is a big reason savvy consumers of the future will (should!) consider open licensing an important criterion for purchase of any product.
Elgan says:

At least with Windows, you could reformat your PC and install Linux or any number of other PC-compatible operating systems. Can I reformat my iPod and install something else? Can I uninstall iTunes but keep using the iTunes store and my iPods? Apple strongly discourages all that, claiming that the iPod, the iPod software and iTunes are three components of the same product. But that’s what Microsoft said about Windows and IE.

Well, fortunately it’s not that bad; my Apple-manufactured iBook and iPod didn’t become useless to me when Apple’s software stopped being worthwhile, because although Apple discourages the practice, they hadn’t started actively trying to prevent users from installing the (free) software that would do what they wanted. Judging by the encrypted firmware that’s preventing Rockbox from being available for the second-generation nano, they’re starting now.

So yeah, the iPhone is sexy and tempting, but when I have the cash in hand for something like that I’m buying an OpenMoko phone instead. The iPhone would work great for a while, but just as I wanted my music player to play .ogg files and I wanted my operating system to give me greater control over the interface, I’d soon enough want my phone to do something it didn’t already do; and at this point I’m not interested in supporting manufacturers who restrict my freedom to do what I want with the devices I’ve purchased.