As a music lover I consume a lot of music.  I’m a passionate collector and love the physical formats – CDs, vinyl, tapes.  I first ventured into the murky world of downloading music in order to obtain digital copies of music I owned on vinyl in around 2004.  I used iTunes, but soon grew weary of the restrictive DRM which saw a large number of purchased rendered useless when I invested in a non-apple portable music player.

I began using an alternative service recommended by a friend which had very good pricing and seemed legitimate.  I’ve since been made aware of the fact that the site is not necessarily legitimate.  This concerns me deeply and so I’ve undertaken to remove all the music I’ve purchased from this site from my library.  As such I’m going to have to invest time and money in purchasing the music I will now miss from a guaranteed legitimate source.  In my case I’m going to play it very safe, go back to my roots and purchase only physical media from reputable vendors.  I hope this will result in a small contribution to the recovery of the music stores which we’ve seen suffer greatly over the past few years, help to compensate the artists who are struggling as the music industry looks for ways to adapt to the digital world, and finally ease my conscience.  I’ll update this blog with progress in due course – a nice catalyst I think for me to share some of my music tastes with the world.

So without further ado, my first new purchase:

Kings of Convenience – Riot on an Empty Street

Purchased from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00026W82U

Since first hearing Kings of Convenience on a mix-tape my sister made for me back around the time of my European road trip in 2005 I’ve grown to love their laid-back vocal layering and fresh approach to song writing.  Erlend Oye has a great talent in particular, his solo work being high on my list for later purchases!

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Update: http://pro-music.org/Content/GetMusicOnline/OnlineStores.php is a useful page for locating legal download sites.