Recently I was discovering some music from Scott Stapp's solo career, in particular his song "Mary's Crying"^[1], and I've been searching for a place where I could purchase his music. Unfortunately, this is not so easy nowadays. I do not have an Amazon account, nor Google Play, nor Apple iTunes, and I wish to keep it that way. What I've been searching for is a platform where I can purchase music without creating an account, and receiving the actual audio files - ideally in a lossless format like FLAC. The only platform I've found that meets this condition would be Bandcamp^[2], but this platform mostly has indie artists.

Overall, this makes obtaining music legally (i.e. not pirating) much more difficult for those who wish to avoid these large platforms and having a dozen different accounts for the same thing. It's no surprise either that, especially with the COVID situation, many physical music stores are either closing or difficult to get to. As such, it is not more freedom or choices that we're gaining, but rather we're losing them. At least losing any actual meaningful choices.