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Comment by hpaavola | Hacker News Reader

Any recommendations for music stores which sell mp3's? I ordered Nokia 8110 4G and ditch my smartphone once it arrives. I think it only supports mp3's so I need to start buying albums and not rely on Spotify.

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https://bandcamp.com/ ?

Bandcamp is truely the best music platform and one of the best websites there is today. It's fair to artists and its UX is in the rarest of states: done. I hope to god they never change a thing.

- CDBaby (https://store.cdbaby.com) has lots of stuff (they stopped offering flac downloads but if all you're after are high quality mp3 files that's not an issue).

- Magnatune (http://magnatune.com) has interesting stuff too (they changed their pricing since my last visit a while ago, now you pay once for the whole library it seems).

- Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (https://folkways.si.edu/shop) is an absolutely fantastic resource in my opinion.

I think that's where CDs come in: for a lot of artists this is the only way to buy an album and end up with non-DRMed, not watermarked plain MP3 you can listen to on whatever you want. You end up with unnecessary plastic waste on your shelf, sure, but at least you have you own, independent music files – and at least you got more value than someone who straight up pirated it.

Good question. When I recently wanted to buy an album as plain MP3 download, I was surprised there was only Google Music and Amazon (and iTunes, though it's a hassle with the terrible iTunes app) left.

You’re local library and a CD drive.

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