Yeah, I thought that part was weird. I have not had too much trouble finding ways to for digital downloads. For Japanese bands I like, I have to do some weird shenanigans to get Japanese sites to let me pay them, but it's not like the digital downloads don't exist at all.
Vinyl and cassette are the most common right now for physical-exclusive stuff. CD sales are very mixed- you can do well or barely sell at all, even for established names, and the startup costs for a pressing are higher than with tapes. And if it's on CD it might as well be a download anyway.
> if it's on CD it might as well be a download anyway
Unless you mean FLAC or something, CD is still higher quality than other formats, and they keep longer than vinyl or cassettes.
Inb4 the "only audiophiles with high end equipment" arguments: if you were around in the days of Blade Encoder tweaking options and trying to fit mp3s onto a 32MB player the size of a cigarette box, you know what digital artifacts sound like.
You don't need to be an "audiophile" or have "high end equipment" to realize that you absolutely want lossless for music archival. How would you want to, say, transcode a collection of MP3 to Opus to fit more tracks onto the same space at acceptable quality without keeping FLACs around?
Although OTOH, people play lossy MP3s over lossy SBC via Bluetooth and don't care, so perhaps the bar of "acceptable quality" is much lower than it seems...
> How would you want to, say, transcode a collection of MP3 to Opus to fit more tracks onto the same space at acceptable quality without keeping FLACs around?
Transcoding 320kbps MP3 to some other lossy codec, once, is really not that bad. LAME at 320kbps is transparent to many people, and while I don't have any A/B test data to back this up, I'd be surprised if re-coding once to Opus at, say, 160kbps, would fare noticeably worse in A/B tests.
> OTOH, people play lossy MP3s over lossy SBC via Bluetooth and don't care
Further evidence that transcoding from one high-bitrate lossy codec to another really isn't that bad :)