Now that you're up to speed, it is pretty much as you guessed. The long and short of it is that it actually costs us a not-insignificant amount of money to turn petroleum in to a certain quantity of compact discs, most of which you don't buy, for varying reasons. We've been talking about doing something along these lines for almost a year, and it's nigh-on time to turn words in to action.

Some of you will no doubt be all up in our grill about this, but suffice to say that the future waits for no man, and I'd be surprised if any CDs at all are pressed in 2012. This is, for better or worse, the way it's gonna be, and we might as well get down to business and start dealing with it.

Elle is working on making some changes to the way the store operates to take this transition in to account; you won't see these for a while, but when they're done, for each album you purchase directly from our store, you will get the normal VBR MP3 we've had for a while now, plus an uncompressed version if that's the sort of thing that floats your boat. (You will be able to download either or both, of course.) The formats available in the other digital outlets such as iTunes will remain at whatever they offer. I submit an uncompressed version to all of them, then they do whatever they do on their end and I have little to no control over it.

I'm currently researching what the best uncompressed format to offer would be. Right now I'm leaning towards FLAC. Personally, from a professional musician's standpoint, FLAC is kind of a dumb format. But most people that aren't musicians that want uncompressed music want it in that format, for better or worse, so that's probably what we'll do. But I'm certainly open to ideas in that regard. We will only offer ONE uncompressed format and ONE compressed one. I think that the BLEEP store, a pioneer in this department, does it right and I'm prone to follow their example.

So anyways, yeah. We have a reasonable quantity of CDs still in stock (we've been anticipating this move for some time, and have not re-pressed any titles for a while) and it's all on sale. This is a time to get the CD for at or around the digital price, and get the download too, of course. So go forth and rock that shit.