Reclaim your music!

jhg said:

As I'm sure most of you know, as of this week the Official UK Top 40 no longer requires a physical medium to be available in the shops for sales to count towards the official charts: downloads from the officially sanctioned UK stores count too.

This is as good a time as any to reiterate the following point:

If you buy a CD, you can rip it and play it anywhere. If you buy from a download service you can't.

Specifically, if you buy from the iTunes music store, you will only ever be able to play your music on Apple products (or optimistically on products licensing the technology from Apple - no such products currently exist). That's iPod and iTunes. No competing software or hardware. You might not care - you might be happy with Apple products right now. But can you guarantee you'll like Apple's products in 2010? What if you want a type of product Apple doesn't make, like a media PC, or a network audio player? Or a games console? Sorry, no music for you!

Of course this isn't specific to Apple. You can buy from other stores, and get locked into other small groups of manufacturers. Microsoft even managed to launch two incompatible download services.

Some of the other services don't lock you in as much as Apple, but you still have to pay a lot of attention to whether your downloaded music works with your (current or future) hardware. There are even some smaller download services which don't restrict you at all, but they tend not to have mainstream music on them. So, right now, as a rule of thumb:

You should buy music on CDs if you think you might want to listen to it in the future.

I know a lot of people are painfully aware of all this, but I've had conversations recently which have indicated that some people really aren't. Hence the post.

Please note, this post is not to be taken as saying I don't like Apple's products (I'm not brave enough to say that in public), just the lock-in.