1237 - I'm Gonna Lock My Heart

2010-03-04

Or maybe not, it’s just that I took a series of images of locks, with this one the best of the bunch 🙂

The Song of the Day is “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart” by Billie Holiday, and this presents me with a dilemma. Let me explain:

I normally link to CDs at Amazon. I don’t know, I am that way, I have always bought my music, and I liked to buy it in a way that gave me something to put on a shelf. No more so. I wrote about it recently, I have begun to buy digital downloads.

I have this song in a collection of ten CDs that are not available any more. I got them for 10€ sometime last year. On Amazon I found it in a single CD that’s only available via their marketplace, and in a collection of nine albums, “Good Morning Blues, The Complete Columbia Recordings 1933-1950”, that are currently only available as digital downloads and, as so often with digital downloads, you cannot buy them from Europe via this link. It’s not that I normally bought CDs from Amazon.com that often, I normally used their UK or German branch, but at least theoretically I could and sometimes I have.

Of course what I really recommend are the downloads. Go figure: 230 songs for $15.98, and you don’t even have to rip them! It’s a steal.

But then: in an age of digital downloads, this artificial market fragmentation created by a copyright system long gone crazy, a copyright system that is completely inadequate for world-wide digital distribution, in such an age I find it increasingly hard to link to something that all of you could possibly buy.

Well, it’s not all that bad, actually you get the same collection at Amazon.de as well, it’s even the same price (numerically, 15.98€, the straight conversion not considering taxes would be 11.71€, but we Europeans always like to pay some more 🙂), but still, this is not always so and it’s still not the same link. It’s not even possible to take the Amazon.com link and exchange “.com” with “.de”. Amazon.de has it, but under a different link. Oh my!

Enough of the rant. What about you? Do you still buy plastic? Do you buy downloads? Or do you just download?

Oh, by the way, hear it on YouTube.

There are 4 comments

Flo   (2010-03-04)

Love the shallow DOF, Andreas. As for music, I usually buy CDs through Amazon.com or from one of the local bookstores. I don't want to load up my laptop with too much stuff other than my own photos. Besides, my laptop does have a DC/DVD player.

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Cedric   (2010-03-05)

Once upon a time I swore I would always buy the disc. I wanted to know that I had something physical and I wanted the booklet that usually accompanied the CD. Then one day I decided to rip all my CDs to a hard drive so that I could create play lists and sync my songs to my portable player. It was then that I realised that I rarely looked at the booklet and that my CDs were taking up a lot of shelf space. Further it wasn't long before I realised that I was listening to my music much more often now that it was so accessible and didn't involve finding CDs, loading them etc. So now I buy downloads, easier, quicker and often cheaper. Now I can't wait for downloadable films and I can stop buying DVDs. btw, love your shallow dof images Andreas.

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andreas   (2010-03-05)

Thanks. About the same for me. Btw, I'm just listening to 248 Frank Sinatra songs (the collection "Concepts") that I bought yesterday at Amazon.de for 5.98€. Compares favorably to the 1.043,06€ for new plastic, or 219,99€ for used plastic. At least that's the prices Amazon.de lists from their marketplace. Add to that the time for shipment. Oh dear 🙂

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1242 – It Could Happen To You | Photographer’s Blog   (2010-03-09)

[...] two images were both taken last week on the same day as “1237 – I’m Gonna Lock My Heart“. The first image is actually a failure. I probably should go back and try it again. The problem [...]

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