Recently in Doing Digital Category

From the point of view of a recording artist or a record label, it appears as though little is being done to address the problem of illegal downloading on the internet. Copyright laws protect the interests of authors and performers, who have the right to choose whether and how their music is sold. The basic case is simple--if an artist chooses to sell their music, then it is an infringement on their copyright and moral rights to take their music without paying for it. Since it is taken without their consent, some people call this "theft".

Here's a question I'd like to open to the world at large. Why are so may retailers selling digital music that has been encoded using lossy formats at inferior bitrates? I have a few theories, and a couple of them may even be true.

One of things that is interesting about alternative digital distributors (i.e. aggregators) like TuneCore, ReverbNation and CD Baby is the retailers they service. Compared to IODA and The Orchard, they distribute to relatively few digital retailers--ten or fewer instead of the hundreds that the largest distributors service.