Fussing and Fighting Today's Technology

For a musicologist like me, the thought of having to download entire albums in lieu of buying the CD is frightening. But I just did my 3rd download. My first two: a Rhino Handmade Television Live album and Radiohead's In Rainbows. The latter was free, so good. My 3rd was a 1975 album by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes called To Be True, the one with "Bad Luck" on it. I read that Philly International was going to put the PIR catalog on Itunes so I've been checking. And Melvin's 3rd album was there. The classic Teddy Pendergrass era only released 4 albums (2 are on CD). But the 2nd album, Black & Blue is not on Itunes or CD. And To Be True has never been released on CD, at least in the States. So I had to grab it. But crap, downloading means no liner notes and I had to burn all the tracks onto a CD-R. What the hell? But for people like me searching for out-of-print stuff, Itunes and the rest will be the only way to go. Still, I wonder why a popular R&B group can't get their stuff released on a reissue label like Collectables, which has done Sony reissues in the past. I guess I better get used to this new Internet only release junk. And I'm not happy about it.