I have tried this week to buy the soundtrack for The Greatest Showman for a gift and let me tell you, it's really hard.

I started naively thinking that, since the album is available on Amazon as MP3, I could just click "Buy" and be done with it. But Amazon, as it turns out, doesn't want my money. Sure, they say they will sell me the album. But once I actually try they reject my credit and debit cards with a mysterious error that, after some digging, may be related to Amazon not having the rights to that album in Germany. I say "may" because Amazon doesn't give me any usable information - all they show is this error:

We were unable to process your purchase with your current payment information. Please enter a valid payment method and an address which are both local.

Seeing that my credit card is valid, my address is local, and the buy page doesn't mention any kind of restrictions, that's my first dead end.

My second stop is Warner Music, who owns the soundtrack. This is also a waste of time: they will gladly sell me physical copies in vinyl, but digital? No luck there.

Next: Apple, the first big company to offer DRM-free music downloads and self-professed champions of user experience. We were off to a rocky start: you can only buy music using iTunes, which is not available in Linux and forces me to boot my Windows 10 PC. One hour later, courtesy of Windows 10 deciding it's a good time for an update, I am faced with this screen:

If you think this well-known and yet unresolved issue stopped me, you are mistaken - I have signed way too many contracts in languages I don't fully grasp to be afraid of what is clearly a credit card details form. Luckily, after giving my password like 6 times, converting m4a files to mp3, and almost two hours later, I am finally the proud temporary owner of this soundtrack.

So let's talk now about Spotify. I reluctantly started using it again because it's one of the few services with an offline mode for Android phones that doesn't require giving my phone number. Seeing as I still object to their collection of private data, I created a fake profile that I regularly renew with gift cards. But do you know what happens when your subscription is about to run out? The answer is "nothing": you get zero notifications, no e-mail, nothing.

What happens when my subscription runs out? First: all of my offline music is deleted, which is the one feature I'm paying for. Since I'm often in offline mode for work, that means no music for me for the rest of the day. And second: just like there is no notification about my balance running out, there is also no option in the app to give a new gift card code. I can easily give my credit card and subscribe forever, but gift cards require extra steps.

What these two infuriating stories have in common is that they are examples of the music industry working both badly and as intended. Amazon, Spotify, and Apple (up to a point) will gladly give me access to the music I'm trying to pay for, but only if I agree to set recurring payments to their walled gardens and access to my private data. Owning my music and keeping my privacy, however, is really hard.

Which brings me to my final point. There is a service with an extensive, high-quality music catalog that's easy to use, works on every platform, let's you keep your privacy, and will take your money but only if you really want to. It's called piracy. And even though it's been almost 10 years since Gabe Newell publicly pointed out how to effectively get rid of piracy for good, we are somehow still living in a world where buying a single music CD takes two hours, Windows, fluency in fictitious languages, and a computer science degree.

At least you can now order your vinyl records via e-mail. Take that, 1980s!