Ever since the demise of Fopp I have been wondering what I should do about music buying. Sure there are still music stores out there, but HMV and Virgin are not up to the same standards as Fopp – less choice, higher price. I’ve avoided music download sales in the past because I refuse to buy any music that I want to keep if it has DRM. There’s no point in having a great album if I can’t archive it, or download it to my MP3 player. But recently Amazon opened up an experimental DRM-free MP3 store. It is only open in the US right now, but aside from that it seems to work. Obviously they don’t have quite the same selection as they have on CD – some record companies still insist on DRM – but there’s a lot of music there. Time to experiment.

After a brief browse I decided on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I’ve been meaning to get it on CD for some time (I bought it on vinyl when it first came out). Amazon had it available for only $9. And it all worked. Even though I’m in the UK right now, my US credit card got me the purchase. The download was a little slow, but that was at least in part because I was doing some off-site backups using another PC at the same time. I now have the whole album. It is downloaded onto my MP3 player, and is playing away happily as I type. I think I can class that experiment an unqualified success. I suspect I’ll be buying a lot more music from Amazon.