Other Music Digital: 70's Japanese psychedelic folk music for your iPod

Made my first purchase from Other Music's new Digital Music Store the other day and it was a great experience. I bought Everybody, The Sea and Cake's latest, The Humbucking Coil by B. Fleischmann, and a fantastic fifty track Trojan Upsetter Box Set.

All music in their digital store is available in DRM-free 320 kbps flat bit rate MP3 format, so the quality is better than both the iTunes Music Store and the rip quality I would normally use for my own CDs. They offer two methods for downloading your purchases: either manual downloading of the individual MP3s or the much easier and seemingly error-free option of using their own OMD (heh) Download Manager.

Their digital offerings are a subset of their extensive and wildly eclectic physical offerings, but the digital catalog is growing literally all the time (they were actually adding new albums to the 'electronic' genre even while I was browsing it).

All in all Other Music Digital is a great new DRM-free high-quality digital music resource to supplement Bleep.com and the emerging DRM-free offerings at the iTMS.

Steve Jobs vs. The Big Four on DRM

In an open letter posted on the Apple website Tuesday, Steve Jobs offers his "Thoughts on Music" to the public.

While innocuously titled, in reality it's an eloquently written argument in favor of completely abolishing all forms of DRM in music sales aimed directly at the big four music companies. It's rational, well-reasoned and bold.

I love it when Jobs decides to change the rules of the game...because he always gets his way in the end and once again he's on the right side of the debate.

This is going to be fun to watch!