Green Music
One of the often overlooked benefits of the digital music era is its total elimination of packaging, storage media and physical transportation. CDs themselves are a pain in the ass to recycle, and standard jewel cases are not recyclable. Some effort has been made in the realm of packaging, as in the package for the recent Squarepusher album Hello Everything, which uses a fully biodegradable case, including the CD tray. Nevertheless, digital music avoids basically every environmental pitfall of traditional physical media music. Unfortunately, the vast majority of digital music has been hobbled by digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, which make the digital product less compelling than its physical counterpart by restricting where and how one can listen to one’s music.
There are a few great DRM-free music stores, but none of them currently carry any major label artists. Emusic is the largest, with an excellent selection of independent music across many genres. Bleep, developed by British electronica label Warp, also has a pretty good selection and includes the option to download CD-quality recordings (most digital music is compressed and therefore lower quality than what you’d find on a CD). Another DRM-free service that I have not tried is Magnatune (with the tagline “we are not evil”).
Recently, Apple’s iTunes Music Store started offering high-quality DRM-free downloads from EMI, the first major label to make DRM-free downloads available. (These DRM-free albums and tracks are advertised under the iTunes Plus moniker, so be careful: not all iTunes music is DRM-free.) Amazon is also planning to open a DRM-free music store with major-label participation later this year. If EMI’s experiment is a success, hopefully the other major labels will follow. Due to the environmental considerations outlined above, I intend to never buy a physical CD again (unless it’s used, I suppose) if it is available in a digital, DRM-free form. Hopefully all albums will be available in this format in the very near future.