Ableton Forum

In reading forge's beatport bashing thread, I find myself gleaning a lot of useful knowledge about some music sites I haven't thought very hard about, and I even took a first look at a site I wasn't aware of. So I'm wondering: where does everyone here go to buy or "download" music for their collection? After ripping all the important CDs in my collection, I went looking for online legal download services. I pretty much ended up migrating to the following (fairly pedestrian) primary suppliers:

iTunes - just now starting to be a legitimate supplier of decent quality downloads
Amazon - painless and a huge (mostly) mainstream collection - plus I have a caffeine-addict friend who gives me Pepsi points bottle caps!
emusic - a pain to search, but useful (cheap) for fleshing out my collection
BLEEP - I love their catalog - have to see how the new site turns out
Amie Street - fun to dig through self-published and Indie groups - occasionally find a real bargain
Beatport - I really like their catalog, but the customer service horror stories concern me
CD Baby - I find some fairly unusual stuff here

For reference, right now I find myself listening to a lot of:
The Black Dog
Richard Devine
Venetian Snares
Speedy J
Nortec Collective
The Knife
Deerhoof
LFO
Mission of Burma
NIN

Where do YOU find YOUR music?

Addictech.com
Sendingorbs.com

mnmnl.nl
beatport (never had any problems here)
bleep
once or twice a year I sign on with emusic for a few months, same thing, to flesh out the collection
juno occasionally
iTunes occasionally
chemical for dubstep vinyl (when I was into it)
occasional vinyl off of ebay
amazon sometimes for cheap cd's

really where ever it is I need to go to get what I'm looking for.

demonoid when I'm feeling naughty, or rebellious

Most of the time I torrent something until it hits the used CD store, then pick it up there for under $10. If it's dance music, either Beatport or djdownload.com.
Also, various music blogs are good sources if you are into bloghouse.

I can't believe how crap current dance music releases are, I've spent a few hours going through all the latest and best sellers on some download sites and found fuck all that I liked. Is all new music just noise?

Worst part is the cost of lossless downloads - £1.50 plus a track, which I am never going to pay. Kind of stupid as if tracks were £1 or less I'd buy lots, I have a fair selection from Stompy when the $ exchange rate was good.

I'll be sticking to buying bulk lots of second hand cd's for a while to come I think.

amazon.co.uk, bleep and napster. I mainly use my napster subscription for checking out new music.

Boomkat is great. I can never find new stuff on bleep, and beatport blows for the genre I'm currently buying. Juno is good for downloads too.

jonny72 wrote:I can't believe how crap current dance music releases are, I've spent a few hours going through all the latest and best sellers on some download sites and found fuck all that I liked. Is all new music just noise?

Worst part is the cost of lossless downloads - £1.50 plus a track, which I am never going to pay. Kind of stupid as if tracks were £1 or less I'd buy lots, I have a fair selection from Stompy when the $ exchange rate was good.

I'll be sticking to buying bulk lots of second hand cd's for a while to come I think.

you fail at looking for things that are dope.

I pretty much exclusively use Itunes, followed by CDBaby.

Junodownload is good for techno, which is pretty much all I buy.

Another +1 for bleep.com.

7digital
beatport (if I have to )

...but my best music purchases have been from the local record shop, often on the recommendation of the guy who runs it...

jonny72 wrote:I can't believe how crap current dance music releases are, I've spent a few hours going through all the latest and best sellers on some download sites and found fuck all that I liked. Is all new music just noise?

.

+1 on that, ive spent hours trawling through shit tune after shit tune, maybe im just too old, or maybe the drugs arent as good as they used to be!

I tend to use the bands/artists label as much as possible

Also, i've began using rapidshare/megaupload/mediafire/music blogs a fair bit recently - great for back catalouge stuff that is hard to get hold off

Generally, I will always try to buy a CD if it's something new-ish, or buy it from the iTunes store. Other than that, I'll scour the web for netlables/music blogs and use eBay for some quality vinyl.

So...

Amazon
eBay
iTunes
T'internet

HMV (not stolen, obviously)

Am I the only person who still buys music in shops?

If that fails, amazon. I only download music not released on a physical format.

Edit: Oh and from the band at a gig (whilst checking out their set up). Best way.