Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Recent Online Music Distribution Musings #1

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Hamada"]Hamada[/caption]

I was playing some old Nils Petter Molvaer (lastfm, wikipedia, fan-site, official) this morning (can it really be 12 years since Khmer came out?!?!?) and wondered what he had been up to recently.

Turns out he released a new album/cd in April this year - Hamada (review at AllAboutJazz) - though it has had hardly any coverage/press. Based on the review, love for his previous music and a feeling that I ought to buy a copy and support the artist (he's gone "own label")  I checked out Amazon.co.uk and Play.com - neither of which stock it (CD or download).

Oh! how odd.

So I double checked his own site (and the horrible/unusable MySpace page - I won't link to it) and he neither offers CDs or downloads for sale directly - nor links to suggested stores/merchants. Digging further I could probably get an (expensive) CD import - or possibly sign up to a German online store and download mp3s (means creating a new account, possible restrictions on my right to buy via a UK IP address).

Interestingly... this fan site forum page gave links to a fileshare site where (it appears) the whole album is available for free.

What would you do?