Like a few others, I’ve been on a bit of a journey to understand the relationship between how I listen to music and how it affects musicians. More specifically, I’m talking about my relationship with streaming services and how poorly they pays artists.

It’s no secret that many streaming services offer a pittance - if you didn’t know, well now you can find out for yourself. In every case, artists are paid less than a penny per stream. The business model of streaming is such that artists will be rewarded by making music that audiences re-listen to over and over.

At first it sounds like a fair enough principle when you try and think about how would a business logistically pay artists money for a service - a service that is billed as “all the music at your fingertips”. The songs/albums that people listen to once or twice are in theory paid less as they are worth less, and the songs/albums that get people listening over and over would be worth more and therefore would be paid more.

Over the years though, artists have figured out the best way to earn revenue is to make tracks shorter. Listeners will re-listen to a track more frequently with a short track (think about 2 minutes long) versus a “long” track (think 3/4/5 minutes long). There is also an incentive to make tracks that are almost loops - tracks that don’t really have much of a beginning or an end to make it more tolerable when listening on loop. The best example I can think of in recent memory is Jack Harlow’s “Lovin on Me” - the song starts almost immediately and the song’s exit also abrupts almost immediately too in such a way that it could be listened on loop. While there is a beginning and an end, they can blur into each other.

That’s not even treading into the AI bot issue that at best Spotify is ignorant to, and at worst Spotify heavily benefits from; I suspect these AI bots can effectively “steal” revenue from artists whose record labels may have managed to negotiate a better royalty offer per stream (think Taylor Swift/Ed Sheeran/Drake kind of artists). It reminds me with Apple’s iOS platform and how iOS has the issue where once an app becomes remotely popular, someone isn’t too far behind to clone it and add In App Purchases (example) and Apple aren’t exactly incentivized to sort the problem out as the clones make Apple a healthy profit.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I’ve decided to go back to the 2000’s and buy MP3s online from reputable resellers as I’ve talked to a friend - Alpha Chrome Yayo (you can find him on Bluesky - and coincidentally you can find me there as well) - about this whole musical kaboodle, and he explained the situation as the income from streaming being able to buy a burger once a month, but the income from albums directly purchased from Bandcamp being able to keep the lights on in his house. That’s a massive difference, and then when you think of other artists (big and small), you really get a sense of how problematic music streaming is.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to be the guinea pig and to see how good (or bad) buying music online (whether it is MP3s or FLACs) are in 2024/2025.

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The very first place I tried was Amazon Music as I’ve had some experience with buying music from Amazon in the past. Previous experiences have been quite painless. I do think if you were to buy modern music, the process is still painless. However, I made the mistake of trying to buy Bone Thugz-N-Harmony’s “E. 1999 Eternal” from Amazon (a hip hop album). Streaming the album was no problem - Amazon Music gave me snippets of E. 1999 Eternal that sounded correct. However, when I went to buy it, in my haste I missed one crucial detail…

… the purchased album was going to be clean rather than explicit…

If you haven’t listened to hip hop and are entirely unaware of the problem, then allow me to explain. Hip hop music generally has a lot of bad language, and E. 1999 Eternal has a lot of bad language as well. Compounding the problem, the rappers behind it talk incredibly fast. This makes it great when listening to the fast rhyming flow in the explicit tracks, but awful when you hear gaps where the bad language should be in the clean tracks.

I’m genuinely astounded that Amazon Music even had a clean version of the album to sell, let alone sold it. It was simulatenously hilarious and horrendous to listen to, made worse that I paid money for this.

Even though this was one example, I also found the downloading experience of Amazon Music albums to be kind of frustrating. Once you bought it, you could easily download the album as one entire zip file (this is perfect). However, if you wish to re-download your library, you are better off using the Amazon Music app that you can download to your PC/Mac (sorry Linux, you’re left out here). Or what I should say is you were, because as of recently Amazon Music has changed their entire UI to the new one, which makes it confusing to download previously purchased music. The new UI is designed for streaming, and the app will constantly try to railroad you to using the streaming tracks instead.

Being fed up of the new Amazon Music experience, I went looking elsewhere.

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I had managed to stumble onto 7digital. I’m not entirely sure how, but I’ve managed to buy a few tracks from there.

What I will say is the experience leaves a lot to be desired.

The whole website is slow, as if the website is running on a Windows 98 desktop machine in someone’s house (despite the company being quite legitimate). You can easily break the website by searching too quickly, clicking links far too quickly, or downloading too many albums in one go. When I download my music, Firefox complains about security issues because the download part of 7digital’s website hasn’t got its SSL sorted out and does the download in plain HTTP - this last part beggars belief, and it shows that this 7digital service was made in probably in the 2010s and hasn’t been updated since.

In fact, just by sheer hilarity, after I wrote the above I opened up the source on the 7digital store, and I had found this comment right at the top:

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<body  class="ie-lt-9" 
<![endif]--><!--[if gte IE 9]>
<body 
<![endif]--><!--[if !IE]><!--><body><!--<![endif]-->

Internet Explorer 9 was first released in March 14, 2011.. Besides, Internet Explorer is sooo dead.

Even better, there was this attribute on the html root (at the top of the page):

xmlns:fb="https://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"

Christ this page is ancient. However, it still works (despite being run on duct tape, spit and some WD-40 from the sixties) and the download retrieved is a zip file. Even better? If you buy multiple albums, you get a big zip file of all your music. Now this is brilliant, and I wished more stores would offer something like this. Even if it was a job that you get sent a special email later on to download the one zip file, similar to how companies offer bulk data exporting.

Another thing to note is that 7digital prices are the cheapest when compared to the competition (at time of writing). 7digital give you the choice of MP3 (cheapest) or FLAC of varying quality (usually the most expensive option).

I did enjoy using 7digital despite the website quirks, but I read somewhere that 7digital can and will remove music randomly - I didn’t know if this was the Windows 98 machine seeking revenge in a form of robot uprising or if it was licensing shenanigans. With that, I decided to look elsewhere for a more… modern… store online.

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I heard a lot of good things about Qobuz. Like, a lot of good things. I kept hearing it was actually a music store, despite me not really seeing the store the first few times. I eventually found the link to the store while trying my best to dodge the streaming services they offered, and to my surprise the store functioned like a modern website:

• It had modern albums and artists that were being released today that it was trying to sell
• The website did not crash no matter how fast I searched
• The download site uses HTTPS. In fact, the entire website uses HTTPS.
• I saw the source, and while there is a reference to Internet Explorer (IE 6 as well!!?!) there is references to the iPhone to get it playing well (nothing for Android though…?)

So all is well, right?

Well… not quite… For a start, the prices are pretty dear. The high price is somewhat tempered by Qobuz giving you FLAC files, but at the same time it would be nice to have MP3s at a cheaper price. But overall I’m not too upset by this decision.

No. What is really grating is the download process. As a Linux user, it is horrendous.

So I stupidly bought 4 albums because I was quite excited by the slickness of Qobuz and I just assumed they would offer a zip file for each album - that’s just common practice, right?

Unfortunately Qobuz didn’t get the message - or more likely, didn’t want to get the message, because their offering was of two choices:

• Download the entire album track by track (I bullshit you not) with the album art individually downloaded OR
• Download the magical Qobuz installer on your Windows/Mac and then have it download the entire album in all these formats blah blah blah

I had to download one by one as I couldn’t install the installer on my Linux machine. I’ve counted - I had downloaded 61 files (4 album art covers and 57 FLAC files). I’m sorry, how is this remotely acceptable in 2025??

Meanwhile, the crusty toaster that 7digital is running on can provide multiple albums in one zip file (sure, I do have to wait several minutes for the server to get this zip file ready).

Zipping up all songs in an album is not hard. Amazon Music offers the ability to download songs in a zip file (even if the UI is horrendous). Bandcamp have been offering this for ages!! (The only reason why Bandcamp isn’t on this list is because it deals primarily with indie artists, and I wanted to purchase music from more mainstream artists).

If it wasn’t for this one stupid inconvenience, I really would’ve switched over to Qobuz, even with the higher price and all.

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I genuinely cannot believe that my options in 2025 to buy music here in the UK is to either:

• Buy from Amazon Music and risk potentially not getting the correct album/product
• Buy from 7Digital and risk overheating the Raspberry Pi/electronic pregnancy test that it is currently running their stores from
• Buy from Qobuz and inconveniently download my tracks one by one, or download some shitty app that the website should be able to do easily

But then again, I would chalk the lack of MP3 competition down in the UK to the complacency and costs - convenience is easy, and outright buying music is inconvenient. Not to mention expensive when compared to even a £15 a month subscription - that’s one or two whole albums for most folks.

It isn’t right that these are the only options to end users, however. I sincerely wish there was more options as I would like money to go to artists where possible (I do realise it isn’t quite as simple as some labels have made deals to get more money with streams, but I’m trying to go with the most simplest example) and more options means better competition for the customer. At the very least,

• I don’t want to have to download tracks one by one
• I don’t want to have to install software to download tracks
• I would like the interface to be simple and clear - i.e. a designated area of all the albums I’ve bought so I can redownload if possible, or if not at least show me the albums/songs as a way of showing me I’ve bought the song/album in the past.
• A working search/filter for purchased music. If I like your platform, I’ll be buying a lot. It would be nice if I could filter down the list of purchased albums/songs.

But I’m definitely not giving up for now. I think for the time being, I’ll dance between 7digital and Qobuz. From my perspective, 7digital does get the job done (eventually), but it is utterly slow at best and problematic security wise at worst. Qobuz is a lot more slicker but their downloading is utterly pitiful and also they do offer a streaming service which to me seems quite at odds with the whole buying music outright. Both of these platforms can nuke songs from my account, so they’re both not exactly great in that regard. Still, I’ll keep waiting for something else to come along and/or improve.