A few years ago I used to be a Google Play Music subscriber (now YouTube music). I had uploaded my own music library under the impression I could redownload exactly what I had uploaded later if I wanted to (mind you some of it was pirated, though much of it I had ripped myself from CDs I owned). Well, the day came I wanted to my music back and GPM had not only completely messed up the filenames, they were also giving me censored or incomplete versions of songs in my export.

These days I play all my music locally. I occasionally pirate, but I often just buy LOSSLESS version of albums directly on Bandcamp. I listen to a lot of electronic music (ex Carbon Based Lifeforms, Jon Hopkins) and Bandcamp has been indispensable. I've considered buying a physical CD and ripping it myself, but so far it hasn't come to that.

Sounds like I need to check out bandcamp. Downloading flac is a lot more convenient than shipping media and manually ripping each item.

Edit: Just set up an account @ Bandcamp. This is looking pretty incredible. Seems like a perfect combination of direct payments to artists, discovery & ownership of purchased content. Looks like most digital downloads are very reasonably priced.

Bandcamp is amazing. You can often stream the music before you buy, so you don’t risk buying stuff you don’t like. Then you have the option of buying a physical copy or just digital. If you buy a physical copy you can still download the flac and start listening immediately while you wait for the record/CD/cassette to arrive.

Bandcamp then goes beyond and publishes articles, blog posts and podcasts where you can discover new music. Even though this is technically advertised content, it feels more like an actual music article/radio show that you can enjoy regardless of if you intend to buy the featured music or not.

I can’t recommend Bandcamp enough.

Just make sure that you have a copy of everything that you buy on bandcamp somewhere other than bandcamp. Stuff gets removed from there too.

I thought you could re-download removed albums from your collection page? But can't find anything on mine to check with right now.

It's pretty incredible that in about a year they'll hit $1000m of payouts to artists.

I don't think you can. If you go to see your purchases, by each purchase there should be a "download album" link. Next to one of my purchases instead there is a "more info" link and if I click it I get the following message: "Sorry, {album name} by {artist name} is no longer available. Please contact {artist name} for more information."

But is the download link also missing from your collection page?

edit: I found one track that has the "more info" link in my purchases, searching for it on my collection gives no results. I guess that answers that :(

Qobuz is another service I've found useful, it has a lot of the more big name artists/recordings that might not be on bandcamp and you can download non-drm flac from it as well. The big downside is a lot of the downloads cost more than ripping an equivalent CD yourself, I can't figure out why that is but it's not always true so you just have to do an extra search first if you want to make sure they aren't ripping you off. But yes, bandcamp is also great, it's my preferred vendor when they have what I want.

> Carbon Based Lifeforms

Nice, I hadn’t heard of these guys. Big Hopkins fan. What else would you recommend along these lines? A few for you to return the favour in advance:

- Rival Consoles - Daniel Avery - Lorn (on the darker side) - Ital Tek

Your music taste is similar to mine, here's some stuff you might like:

nthng Skee Mask vc-118A Mohlao - landforms Traumprinz/Prince of Denmark/Prime minister of doom/etc. (Same guy) Giulio Aldinucci - Shards of distant times (ambient) Wanderwelle (ambient) Quiet places (the whole label A strangely isolated place is amazing, also ambient) Bowery Electric (also Boards of Canada from the 90s) Belong - October Language Rafael Anton Irisarri

I explore a lot of new electronic music and the artists you mentioned I was obsessed with a year ago or so. Since then, I have been digging deeper and deeper, enjoy.

> What else would you recommend along these lines? Aes Dana, Solar Fields, and Emancipator are all also good.

I like Lorn! I'll check out the other artists. Thanks for the recommendation!

OTT (ottsonic.bandcamp.com)

maybe also: Shpongle, Entheogenic, Bluetech, Younger Brother.

I buy almost all my music on Bandcamp these days, great platfotm

Yes, no longer renewing my subscription this year, google play music did similar things to me. I occasionally listen to music, and not fond of my playlist greyed out because of turf wars.

This happened to me too. I'm not sure if you took advantage of uploading your own music library to GPM, but I had uploaded around ~2k songs near Google Play Music's inception. When I downloaded it about a year and a half ago, the track file names were not only often incorrect, but oftentimes they were censored or radio edit version of songs in the export when I knew for a fact the original songs I had uploaded were the original edits.

Things have only gotten worse since the forced transition from Google Music to YouTube Music.

How can such a significant product be so bad?

The answer lies in your question. This is not, in fact, a significant product to Google.

GPM was the moment for me when I finally realized I cannot count on Google services. Since then I migrated to Deezer - so far so good, but I would not be surprised if they also turn to bad. That's why my music collection is backed up in the cloud now. I am self hosting a media server, so I am all good.

YouTube music was the worst with this too. Songs were constantly disappearing or changing

I feel like there is a difference though. You can still buy a lot of music from actual stores (including online stores like Bandcamp and Discogs). If you live in a medium to large city chances are there is a record store nearby where you can go to and buy a copy.

Movies are not the same. Yes there is Amazon but the quality of the DVD copies you get from there are kind of crap (and I suspect a lot of them are actually pirated anyway).

Buying music is a joy, buying movies is not.

I haven't bought a lot of movies from Amazon recently but I used to and they just seemed like normal retail discs? A lot of record stores sell movies too.

Movies at record stores are kind of a novelty. You can go there to browse, but chances are that you will not find the movie you were looking for. I’ve actually had better luck at thrift stores. That being said if they happen to carry a copy of a movie that you want to see and don’t mind adding to your collection it is definitely a joy. But it is kind of a rare experience compared to music.

DVDs at amazon range from fine to terrible. It is almost always better to just torrent the movie. Quite often the DVD has no extras, terrible subtitles, wrong aspect ratio, etc. I have quite a few DVDs which I’m never going to watch again, if I want to rewatch the movie I would rather torrent it, even though the DVD is right here.

Amazon commingling inventory will probably mean that quality varies quite a lot.