They’ll sell you a single track for $1.75, whether it’s a three-minute pop song or 21 minutes of contralto Janet Baker with the LSO being wonderful in Berlioz’s La Mort de Cleopatre. And they’ll sell you an entire album for $17. Excellent.

But they’ll also sell you a multi-CD set for $17. Even more excellent for the consumer, but possibly less so for the artist. One does have scruples. As an occasional author I’m pretty keen on copyright so I do like to pay the artist, but equally I do like a bargain. Hmmm. What to do? Shop, obviously.

So in the last two days I have bought the Miles Davis complete Jack Johnson sessions, a 5-CD set for $17 ($90 at Marbecks); the 6-CD set Beauty is a Rare Thing, the complete Atlantic recordings of Ornette Coleman, for $17 ($177 at Marbecks); the 6-CD set of the Miles Davis Quintet’s complete recordings for CBS, 1965-1968 for $17 ($95 at Marbecks); and Passions of a Man, the 6-CD set of Charles Mingus’s Atlantic albums ($166 at Marbecks). There's also the complete Miles Davis-John Coltrane recordings for CBS, another 6-CD set for $17.

Of course this way you don’t get the lavish packaging, cool 50s and 60s photos, essays by jazz bores and so on – but you do get to hear a vast amount of great music for not much. In this case, 23 CDs for $68, or $2.96 each.

The other odd thing is that of the six bestselling jazz titles today, 21 April, four were the above box sets. Either my current tastes are woefully common, or Digirama isn't selling much jazz.