The Smithsonian’s online music store, Smithsonian Global Sound, is probably the best digital music service I’ve seen thusfar. Here are the reasons why I love it:
- An enormous selection of world folk music, much of it previously released on their own Smithsonian Folkways imprint. Much of it is long out-of-print and previously available only on vinyl.
- The search is great, allowing you to search by country, style, or language.
- Albums are reasonably priced at about $10 a pop.
- Songs you buy can be downloaded for 72 hours after you buy them.
- The cover and liner notes are available as a high-quality PDF with extractable images.
- You can also order the songs pre-burned on CD (without cover art, unfortunately) or recorded on cassette (!).
- Here’s the biggie: when you buy songs, you get them as both non-DRM 192k MP3s but also in the lossless FLAC format.
I plunked down some cash for a couple of very interesting albums yesterday and was just floored by the great content and execution. Awesome stuff.
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