this year.

I bought digital music. Crazy.

Call me old fashioned but I still like to own a physical compact disc so that I have the music in it’s full bitrate form, and if my hard drive ever crashes I can just spend a few weekends re-ripping my music. Also, for that day when we find a better format than MP3 I won’t be stuck with low-quality music, because I can just rip to the new format. But I digress.

I recently heard music by Octoberman on the R3-30 and CBCRadio 3 podcasts and was immediately drawn to their indie-pop harmonies. Visiting their website and downloading the 4 free songs solidified my need to own this entire album. But how could I do this living in Australia? Enter Zunior.com. Zunior sells Canadian music DRM-free at 192 kbps in the MP3 format, and all the albums cost $8.88 (CAD). $8.88 is a very accessible price so I created an account and bought the album. To my gleeful surprise I received $1 off my first purchase as a ‘hello, thanks for checking us out’ from Zunior. Thus, for a grand total of $8.41 I am the owner of Octoberman – Run From Safety, plus a bonus track and the album cover/liner notes in PDF. Not to shabby.

Octoberman has a number of shows coming up on Southern Ontario through the month of October (coincidence?), so if you have a chance check them out. The song that started this post is Run From Safety but I’d like to share ‘X-Pat’ a track from the 2005 album These Trails Are Old And New.

Octoberman – X-Pat

Lastly, their t-shirts merchandise are great for people born in the month of October.

(* My first digital purchase was the Vaccination Scar single in 2004 from Puretracks, and my second was the Wolf Parade EP from iTunes in 2005. Oh, and a live Watchmen concert from MapleMusic. But other than those three, this is my first.)