Once upon a time, those of us who didn't live near big cities or trendy college towns relied on the local mall to buy music. In exchange for an outrageous sum of money, we were given a selection of around 20 CDs and a bargain bin full of old Foreigner albums. For the rare times when we wanted a CD not found on the Billboard charts, we were at the mercy of the surly sales staff to make a special order.
Oh, how the Internet has freed us from our shackles! Now, anything is available, anytime, for a substantially lower price than the mall stores. The most challenging aspect is sorting through the options.
For buying common compact discs, big can be better. Both CDNow.com and amazon.com have a huge selection of domestic and import titles at affordable prices-perfect for everything from sale-priced Busta Rhymes to the French techno-jazz hipster Saint Germain. If you're looking for something too rare for the big sites, try midheaven.com, where they're not afraid to pepper their site with the f-bomb. Also check out parasol.com and insound.com, both well-known independent music specialists.
If you want a song, but not a whole CD, some sites allow you to make custom combos from pre-set selections. You'll rarely achieve the sort of musical bliss of the Napster-CDR combo, though. CDNow's $18-20 custom CD option offers unmemorable song pools like the Black Music Collection, which features "Bust a Move" by Young M.C. alongside B. B. King's "Recession Blues." Slightly better is ezod.com, though it's still not worth the price.
Record corporations are hoping to replace Napster with pay-per-download sites like icrunch.com that let you download MP3s for around $1.70 each. The selection is wide enough to include trance artist BT and the new album from Femi Kuti, making it almost worthwhile to shell out a few coins in order to find a rare track or download from a fast, reliable source. Another site, emusic.com, offers a fairly sizable roster of acts and labels, including many lesser-known indie imprints that never make it to Napsterland.
We're clearly better off than we were when we couldn't get good CDs because Paula Abdul took up all the shelf room at Sam Goody's. If you can't bear the shortcomings of the Internet music scene, perhaps you should download some techno software from fruityloops.com, where you can make some good music of your own-and then charge your roommate to download it.
-By Robert Kelley
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