Sometimes It's Just Too Wierd On the Internet

I mean seriously, you have options that does not make sense at all and then you wonder how to value music with the ease of availability (with little or almost no cost at all) on the Internet.

So anyway, for the past few days, I have been trying to look for Paul & Price CDs online. Amazon.com sells them at 20 USD over bucks on average, exclude shipping. CD at the official website is priced at 14 USD dollars (exclude shipping) per album. And then, mp3 256kbps vbr also available at 8.99~9.99 USD /album at Amazon.com as well.

A further search on google will give you a website called allflac.com that is selling the album in *.flac format at 2.00 USD on average per album. It is so ridiculously cheap that I went on to check out that this website is probably illegitimate. Although cheap, the money doesn't go to the artist. Undecided if I should spend more money getting mp3 (lesser quality) vs. ridiculously discounted price on flac (CD quality), or stock up more inventory (CD), which I should really stop doing so because I have just spent too much on music recently (gigs, CDs from the show, T-shirt only bought 1 though).

I went on to google for more sources of CD (cduniverse.com, musicstack.com, cdbaby.com) and prices were either almost the same, or their albums are not available. Talking about shopping online, you have to really do considerable amount of research via google.com or even yahoo.com.

So anyway, after spending a few days of looking and going back to Amazon.com for well over 10 times, I suddenly stumbled upon a website that also (finally) has flac format for all the albums. And, it's free.

Seriously, I do not know what to think anymore. It is kind of funny, and I do feel very sorry for artists. However, although the free stuff are easily available and sometimes even more so than the non-free ones on the Internet, I feel a need to contribute to the artist's salary if I do find their music well worth the money. Probably for the younger tech-savvy generation, it is more important to instill this thought to them, rather than finding ways to prohibit things that masses are already doing and seemingly unstoppable.

P.S.: Luckily I only have a few idols that I really support all the way, and they do not have one new album every year, otherwise I would have gone bankrupt years ago. =P