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I put off buying X&Y whilst I hunted out a good price. I neglected to order it from Amazon, instead thinking it would be reasonably priced in the major high-street music shops. When the best price I could find was some £4 higher than Amazon, itself a bit more expensive than iTunes, I couldn’t wait much longer and bought it from iTunes: The cheapest price for a new album.

I ummed and ahhed a bit about ordering an album I expected to like from iTunes, normally preferring to buy “big” albums like this in pressed-dead-dinosaur-juice format, so I can admire it in my non-existant CD cabinet. I thought about how I listened to albums these days, and it’s almost exclusively when I’m sat at a computer, or via my iPod. Essentially, there is absolutely no place for rotating pieces of plastic in my listening habits. When we finally have somewhere to live, I’ll probably make use of airport express and MP3 players. So there’s absolutely no justification for cluttering up the house with a CD case.

Sure, I miss leafing through the inclusion and perhaps reading the lyrics. But it’s something I’ll do once or twice, before forgetting about. I’m also not hugely bothered by the Apple “Fairplay” DRM. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather not have DRM at all, but that’s not going to happen, and Apple’s version is the “least worst” out there. And anyway, it’s trivially easy to turn a restricted AAC track into an MP3 if you really want to. So I’ve sort of decided I’m going to “give up” buying CD media from now on, with occasional exceptions of course. Sometimes it’s nice to wander about a music shop when you’re in town, and just pick up the music that interests you. That I can “browse” the music at the iTunes Music Store is great, but browsing a shop will always be more fun.

With regard to X&Y, well I’ve been listening to it exclusively this morning, and - as before with “A Rush of Blood to the Head” - it’s an album that grows on you. There are some great tracks, and some not so great tracks. But the tone is entirely more upbeat than their previous fare. I almost never listen to “Parachutes” because so many of the singles are just plain down beat, but AROBTTH is entirely better, if somewhat more emotive. So X&Y continues that development: It’s more accessible and mainstream, I think, as a whole than previous albums.

Whilst there’s some criticism that so much of British Music “is all like Coldplay now” (such as Keane), I think it’s an unfair accusation. There’s a certain sound that typifies a lot of British popular “alternative” music, but there is plenty of innovation going on, and a nice return to considered melodies and vocal work in both Coldplay and Keane. I like both, and play both regularly. All said, I’m quite optimistic about the British music scene at the moment, and all the more so now that the much anticipated X&Y has come out, and demonstrated quite comprehensively that Coldplay are a band that’s here to stay.