Posted February 19, 2017
Of course, the existing DRM-free stores are a joke.
They are not available in Europe, and even if they were, paying 2.5 times as much for a download as I would for a CD (including intercontinental shipping) is not a real option.
As for indie music, then yes, there are actually a couple of sites. I haven't bought anything from those yet, because I would prefer to have all (or at least most) of my music purchases in one place.
What I find really ironic is how the industry in some cases almost forces to pirate things. If I want to buy let's say classic hard rock, it's "not available in your country". +1 for pirates.
And if I want to buy some kpop, there is a wonderful store called Bugs! which has almost all kpop on sale as MP3 and FLAC. Too bad it's all in Korean, so creating an account is challenging. When you finally get it done and try to buy something, you'll notice that the site only works with Internet Explorer.
When you start up the clumsy and slow IE, and finally manage to get something in the shopping cart, during the payment process you will be surprised to find out that among the 30 payment options available, they don't have PayPal, Visa, MasterCard or any other standard payments, only some local Korean payment systems and Korean credit cards.
I shouldn't probably complain about that though. At least they have legal FLACs in Korea, which they really don't even have in my country. Still, it really doesn't make any sense to give pirates such an advantage on all continents and then complain how people don't buy music anymore.
(OK, I could get just about everything in lossy formats from iTunes, but disliking both lossy formats and Apple, that's simply not even a hypothetical option.)
