Mo' Music

Today’s musical adventure started because Warren Ellis put a Theory Anesthetic track on one of his Apparat compilations. It was good, so I went looking for more. They have some stuff on mp3.com.au and some streams on MySpace, but their main place is on Mperia. But you can’t buy CDs. It’s a pure internet play: Download for a fee, or stream for free. And it’s on a song by song basis. This leads to a whole set of observations on music buying psychology.

I’d heard a couple tracks I liked, and I would have bought an album ($10 to $15) based on that, with no second thoughts. But since the tracks are sold separately, I have to make individual buying decisions on them. I could just say, there are 11 tracks, so it’s $11 for the whole mess. That’s about what a CD would cost. But I don’t get a CD.

Psychologically, there’s a difference between paying for intangible data and paying for a physical object. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned. But if you want me to pay for just a download of a song, I’m comparing it to all the songs I can (legitimately) download for free. Is it that much better? If you’re selling a CD, I’m comparing it to other CDs I can buy. That narrows the field a lot.

I’ve also got two practical issues with download-only distribution: I can’t listen to it in my car (unless I take the trouble to burn my own disc), and it’s one more thing to back up (or lose when my hard drive dies). Nothing huge, but just that much more hassle.

Buying music track by track also kills serendipity. You buy a CD for the couple of tracks you know and like. After a while, you find that you have different favorite tracks. Songs that didn’t really grab you the first time around have gotten under your skin.

So now, instead of a CD impulse buy, I’m making a full-blown multi-variable purchasing decision. Furthermore, my brain is in this strange music buying mode. I wouldn’t think twice about spending $1 on a can of coke or any number of equally ephemeral things. But a can of coke is a can of coke. I don’t have to worry whether this can of coke is better than that can of coke. But I’m buying music, so I have to make a buying decision: Given that I can’t afford to buy all the music that is acceptable, which music do I buy? So I have to listen to each track, asking myself, Do I really need to own this?

After listening to all the tracks, and going through all this (self-imposed) decision making stress, there’s only one track that really grabs me. Now, the question is, is it worth going through the buying process for a $1 purchase? Fortunately, I’m already signed up for Bitpass, so it’s pretty easy. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered.