I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself, as I've started noticing more and more that some of the songs I have on Spotify have started to disappear, but I find it very difficult to buy modern music anymore. Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms. Is there a way to still buy the same kind of music that is on streaming platforms, and actually get the audio files?
Or going to their live shows if they happen to come to a venue near you.
Or by buying vinyl at a local record store. Sadly, those are dying out, but you can find one or two good ones in any major city.
In electronic, hip-hop, and a lot of music that has a lot of computer-assisted production, a lot of producers will also release sample packs or VST presets that they sell directly on their websites. While often in small amounts, $50 or less, it more often than not goes directly to the artist with very little middlemen involved. While not a huge stream of revenue I'd imagine, it probably does help smaller artists if they can count on an additional couple hundred bucks a month from people that truly appreiciate their craft and I'd bet that if I reached out to artist XYZ whose music is no longer available on major platforms and said "hey i have been to a few of your shows, bought all your sample packs, and I can't find your tracks anymore" the artist, if small enough, would probably oblige and send along a nice little folder of music.
Record stores are thriving pretty much everywhere across the US. The ones that have been closing are the ones that only hold old stock and don't curate their inventories
If you walk into a shop and all you see are old, worn out Barry Manilow and Bob Seger albums at $30+ a pop, the store isn't meant to last. Thankfully, the problem has been solving itself
It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.
Buy it, download as FLAC, put in your preferred local infrastructure to play. Plex/Plexamp works well, as does local file storage and a good command line music client if you're less GUI-friendly or don't have the resources for running them.
Another source are good ol' CDs. If you know where to look you can get them cheap too. Specialist charity shops that specialise in records and CDs in student or wealthy areas are good, as are second hand stores online.
plex alternative: jellyfin + finamp or fintunes. This is my new setup (alongside bandcamp if I haven't yet imported the bandcamp purchase into my jellyfin library). No cloud shit, no subscriptions, but I still support [most of] my favorite artists. Ones which aren't on bandcamp, well either I still have the CDs kicking around or some mp3s from wherever (yt-dlp + ffmpeg is useful when lazy too)
> It's not. Artists will often enough remove old albums so you can no longer play them.
That doesn't happen on other platforms?
I had two albums of a band who's front man died and they disbanded. The albums were removed but I still have them in my collection. You cant find it on the site anymore but I can still download and play them.
No, making an album private does not disappear the music from people who have purchased it.
However, Bandcamp does abide by the laws that require them to stop distributing music at the rights holders' request.
No music service, or any service, for that matter, will guarantee access to files without regard to laws. Some will try harder, some have tried harder and been beaten down.
this has happened to me once, appropriately enough with some hauntology tracks. the songs are weirdly enough still available in the ios app to play but not to download via the web. presumably they're still somewhere in bandcamp behind a boolean, but i never got around to downloading them (to be fair, i have them on a _cassette_ that originally included bandcamp codes, so i mean, i really can't complain, i knew what i was getting into)
This happened to me a bunch. I think in one case an artist released an album, but wanted to disallow buying individual tracks so they relisted it after I bought one track.
The most infuriating thing is that bandcamp gaslights you on it. I eventually confirmed that yes, I had bought that song, after tracking down the receipt in my email provider or something (it was hidden from purchase history, bandcamp "I can't find my music" link didn't mention this, etc etc).
This isn't just an issue for playing music though - if you buy a bunch of stuff but don't download it right away you could loose it too. I bought the track I mentioned right after it was released, and the substitution happened within a day or two of that.
Like, I get it, if there was some legal issue (pirated work - and then they should issue refunds). But the fact that bandcamp tries to hide it just means that they know they have no moral grounds here.
When I moved country and updated my credit card in Spotify to my card from the new country Spotify also changed my “region”. As a result there are so many songs I have “starred”/“added”/“liked” (whatever fucking language they’re using for it now) are just greyed out and unplayable.
Anyway as for actually getting copies of the music I listen to I think we should just pirate it completely unashamedly.
some time ago when I canceled spotify, they show this special playlist like "we'll miss you" or whatever, and each of the song names, in order, spell out this little goodbye message. Ironically one of the songs in that playlist was greyed out and unplayable. Like, great job reminding me why I'm canceling :)
It's probably not Spotify's fault though, but it's actually on account of being able to finely control legal ownership of licensed songs. This is all insane imo, but legally sound. Welcome to the future.
I've been doing this, and here in Canada https://ca.7digital.com/ is literally the only option I've found that let's you buy normal MP3s, would highly recommend. I've been able to get modern albums without a hitch, but don't know about modern singles. I think in the US Amazon let's you buy MP3s, but not sure there.
For the price of a Spotify subscription, I can usually buy a new album every month! Which is great; and I love slowly growing my album collection.
While it’s more of a treasure hunt, I really enjoy browsing for and buying physical CDs, especially second hand. Albums are often $1, they sound as good as when they were released and they’re easily convertible to any other audio format, including lossless, 16-bit, 44.1khz formats. The only thing better is SACD, but finding that is like a diamond in the rough and ripping it is its own challenge unless you have the right equipment.
People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.
A few years back, I did an apples-to-oranges test of an album I had on vinyl and CD. The vinyl version probably sounded better (usual BS about warmth and whatnot) but the CD sounded very, very good and it was way closer than I was expecting. It had been ~15 years since I'd listened to a CD on a real stereo and I'd totally forgotten how good they can sound. I'd certainly been swayed by the vinyl enthusiasts in the interim, too.
The CD was so clean and clear but not in a robotic way. (I don't think this album had fallen victim to the loudness war either, fwiw.) Whereas the record sounded "warm" but also a little muddy and quiet (not in a good way) in comparison. I know there could be any number of reasons for this but that's also part of the problem. Was my setup dialed in and this is how it was supposed to sound? Or, was the table not flat? Was the needle dirty? Was the tracking force off? Yes, it's fun to tweak these variables but ... it's also fun to just listen to music that sounds excellent with zero effort.
I've started buying CDs again (to my spouse's chagrin) and have no regrets. I do need to start ripping them before discrot comes for them. For anyone in the market, library sales are an excellent option to, essentially, buy CDs by the pound. They also often have rare compilations and anthologies that you won't find in thrift stores.
CDs get a bad rep because people incorrectly assume that all digital music is CD quality. CDs are inherently superior to any lossy codec, especially the ones used by streaming services.
Also discrot is only a problem if you don't keep your CDs in a case, or if the case is made entirely of transparent acrylic and you lost the labels and teh little booklet. They're very reliable when properly protected from scratches and radiation.
Disc rot is not a thing for factory pressed CDs, assuming normal storage. Cheap CDRs from ~2000 or so did have the issue. My CDs from the 80s and CDRs from the 90s are working fine.
I don't use my cds too often anymore, but I've got a pressed 2-disc set of the soundtrack from the song remains the same that's became unplayable because the media developed holes.
These were stored in the case in my home, mostly coastal California, no severe environmental conditions.
Disc rot of pressed CDs seems rare, I don't think I've seen it on other discs, but if it happened to me, it's definitely a thing.
I'm sure defective ones exist. For kicks I just opened my first CD, Bryan Adams' Reckless, bought late '84... it's in perfect condition. Put it on, and it sounds great just like the first time.
disc rot is a thing for every disc that's made with aluminum, which is all but a very few super special ones like mobile fidelity sound lab made with gold. Oxygen permeates through both the polycarbonate base and the clear coat top, maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but always.
Sure, I'll buy that: Aluminum and oxygen are great friends that love eachothers' company, and on a long-enough timeline here in Earth's atmosphere they'll always be reunited.
But how does that timeline compare to that of a human? Or even of the compact disc itself (a bit over 42 years old now)?
I mean: At least anecdotally, I have never discovered rot on any of my CDs that did not also have other contributing condition issues. I haven't even experienced the once-reported issues of air-dried, solvent-based (instead of UV-cured) inks. (And although my sample set is not infinite, it is also not particularly small.)
As a laserdisc collector, I am particularly aware of disc rot and in those it is far more present by now. Practically all discs have some level by now even the good ones, and even if they look clean to the eye. There are people that say the same thing there, that there are good discs that don't have rot and bad ones that do. But that is not true, there are only better and worse examples, faster and slower progress.
cds are both younger and built better, so they will not only last to a later absolute date, they will last longer relative to their manufacturing date, but cds have a few other things that mask rot even when it starts, which is both that they are digital and the player has buffering and interpolation, and also that the data format includes redundant data for error correction. (ld is analog and has neither, later better players do add some digital processing but it can't do the kind of good job with a 6mhz analog fm ntsc video signal that a cd player can with a simple audio bitstream)
A cd with the same rot that is visible on a ld (visible in the output not visible to the eye on the physical disc) will appear to play perfectly even in the cheapest junk player.
So, it will take longer, but I see no reason to treat "longer" as "indefinite".
There is no specific time, but it is inevitable and I don't think it's in the 100's of years but in the 10's of years, and the 10's of years, especially when many are already 30 years old, is not very many more 10's of years left.
And if that turns out to be pessimistic and they last another 50 or more? That's just a bonus. Lucky future rippers who get a chance to rip with even better tech later.
Tangentially I do also assume that some day long before the polycarbonate disintigrates, there will be a practical way to read even fully oxidized discs with a different frequency laser or even a camera or microscope-based head, or even a bulk scanner that just rasterizes the whole surface without even bothering to read the track in a spiral until after the fact purely in software.
As time goes on, tools get both better and more accessible, so in 1995 it would not be possible for a person to make their own laser head, but today it probably is, and in only a few more years will just get easier and easier, and probably at a rate that outruns the rate at which the discs fully degrade.
This should be objectively true, but the limitations on vinyl prevent some of the abuses in the production processes (the loudness wars). Often vinyl is better anyway just because the engineers had to go back to make a good mix (mostly this is mastering not mixing) for vinyl - if the vinyl mix had been put on CD the CD would be objectively better.
Vinyl does theoretically have a better s/n ratio, but you can only see this in perfect setups, including a new needle in your player. Even then after just a handful of plays and vinyl is worn enough to be worse (I've heard of laser based vinyl plays which don't wear the media - I have no idea if they are real or how they compare to CDs, but I need to acknowledge them because they might be different enough to matter)
I don't think the S/N ratio of vinyl approaches that of CDs. If you give vinyl a perfect literally flawless $10 million dollar setup and freshly carve a new disc from a fresh press plate and play it, even though analog has no reasonable bounds on how loud it can get from a physics perspective, there are dozens of things that in reality will get introduce noise into the system that are not present in CD Audio.
It will likely sound at least just as good as a similarly treated CD, but I doubt that it will approach the S/N ratio of a properly mastered CD.
CD has by default a perfect 0 noise floor, whereas vinyl will never have that, and typically has a pretty high noise floor, meaning that even a good vinyl press will never have the same noise floor as the same recording placed on CD.
I said all of that to say, to me vinyl is appreciable for its flaws compared to CD. Vinyl is mastered to a different spec than CDs are (when its done properly), and it can sometimes add to the experience because the mastering and pressing process focuses on different frequencies.
Aside from that, the fact that each time you listen to a vinyl record it changes in subtle ways, bits of dust get moved around, atomic scratches get worn into the surface, meaning that every listen is completely unique, ever so slightly different than any other time that album or any other similar pressing has been played.
That is one of the thoughts I enjoy when listening to vinyl that makes it likeable, a little more special to me when it crosses my mind.
Digital is almost always the same. Analog is always different.
If the store of your choice offers FLAC as an option (and I think they all do), you can simply make your own MP3s from the FLAC files. That's one of the biggest advantages of lossless audio. (The improvement in audio quality is actually pretty minimal, for most people.)
You can also keep the FLAC files to convert them to some future format later, or even do something really wild like burn them to a CD or something.
I did that for a while, but all the tools seem to have been unmaintained for the last decade. The command line ones still work, but the GUIs to make them easy still depend on qt3 or other such obsolete things. (streaming servers like jellyfin do this on the fly easy, but other workflows for offline use don't work anymore even though they are still sometimes useful)
Most people weite scripts with said tools which can keep going for a long time. I have a couple laying in my library directory to add replay gain metadata, convert to aac, and backup.
IIRC those are only 256 kbps. I get that MP3 is a lossy format, but still, they could at the very least offer 320 kbps. I was under the impression Amazon wasn't short on server space.
As an equally reluctant option one side or the other to Amazon, Apple's "iTunes Store" still exists and is "mostly" DRM free, if you don't mind AAC and friends (MP4 Audio) rather than MP3. It's getting harder and harder to find those Buy buttons, especially if you start from an Apple Music link/the Apple Music app, but it's currently no worse than Amazon as Amazon and Apple seem deep in direct competition on how hard they make it to find Buy buttons.
> I'd love to actually buy music and store it myself...
Qobuz. For a start they only do lossless: no mp3. We're soon a quarter of a century into the 21st: gone are the Napster days of needing to stream mp3s.
Then Qobuz often has albums in higher quality than 44.1 kHz / 16-bit stereo. Not that you'll hear the difference: but artists/sound engineer going to the trouble of offering higher sample rate / bit depth typically do care about producing good sounding music so there's that.
Then Qobuz allows you to do precisely what you want: you can buy individual tracks or full albums to download, no DRM.
I've got both a collection of audio files I ripped myself from my own CDs (which I keep too), in a 100% bitperfect / lossless way (verified with an online DB of people who also ripped their CDs) and a Qobuz subscription.
The one criticism about Qobuz would be that music discovery ain't the best out there: the UI is actually quite bad. But it's good stuff for people who care about quality and who love to own their music.
Most network streaming devices now support Qobuz: for example I've got a fully integrated Yamaha amp that contains a network streamer (Yamaha R-N1000A) and MusicCast (Yamaha's music streaming app, like Sonos I guess but Yamaha) supports Qobuz (and Tidal and Spotify).
You don't just rent temporary access to an online service that may disappear under your feet or remove songs you used to listen to: you can actually buy and own individual tracks.
Check the plans they have: depending on how many songs you buy, one may be better than the other.
IIUC Spotify, under the pressure of both Tidal and Qobuz, announced they'll be moving to lossless streaming. It's 2024. At fucking last.
Qobuz removed a range of releases a couple months ago at short notice, including from users' accounts. Hopefully their catalog remains strong as it's about the only online-only store with lossless that has a wide variety of mainstream artists.
I'll also mention: Bleep.com, Boomkat, Ninja Tune (label that directly sells), Junodownload.
Yep, "Pink Martini - A Retrospective" was removed after I bought one song from it, when I click on the track in my library the error toast states "It's impossible to play this track. Thank you for trying another playback format."
But that's the whole point of buying it, mp3 is safely on my SD card, plays just fine
It wasn't explained officially. I assume some distribution arrangement changed but the artists/releases were so varied and from various labels that I can't determine the relationship. I'd bought a handful of releases there and all of them were affected.
I look for music on bandcamp, 7digital, and then amazon music in that order. All offering drm free mp3 and flac files. I don't think there has been something I wanted that I havem't been able to find yet.
The subscription pays tidal, but tidal only pays out based on usage... The artist gets about $0.01 per stream.
The best way to support artists is to purchase albums the week they're released... Sales numbers are a key metric when labels decide touring and investment in the next album... Could mean a better studio or more resources...
If you are committed to the download off of tidal strategy, then please make a playlist of the tracks you download and play it overnight... Otherwise, none of your money supports the artists you listen to.
Tidal has lots of downloader clients you can install due to its often technical but niche user base. May I suggest Tidal-Media-Downloader[0]?
Now if only there was a way to download things from YouTube Music with a Premium subscription. It's practically impossible to search for "YouTube Music download" without falling into the 'youtube-dl YouTube mp3 audio tracks!' SEO hole. Vague naming on Google's part.
You can 100% download higher quality audio tracks from YouTube using yt-dlp. You have to use session cookies from a browser that you've logged into your premium account with to get the higher quality tracks. There are options with yt-dlp to help with this.
This is kind of the confusion I mean. Sometimes YouTube Music has audio tracks that you are seemingly different to the "X Artist - Topic" videos you can find on YouTube proper. I'll have to revisit this again to see if it's all the same now, because the last time I was looking into it a few years ago not everything I had organised in playlists on YTM was available via regular YouTube playlists I could rip with yt-dlp.
I recently learned about buying Mp3s on Amazon. Most CD purchase pages have a "purchase options" and you can do Mp3s. I do that for mainstream things for my kids that aren't on bandcamp (such as music from a kids TV show).
I'm actually working on a IoT device where one of the main goals was selfhosting audio content for my kids. Uses AI for the user interface. Similar to Alexa but battery powered. Still in private beta (orders are closed right now) but here is the link for anyone curious. https://heycurio.com/
Ah. AG Talking Bear meets LLM. I started working on something similar a year back - but tried to keep it restricted to offline which made it more challenging since inference on CPU of raspberry PI limits you to very small models.
Sending voice clips of children to an always listening server is just a bit too dystopian for me.
I like Qobuz too, but have a couple issues with it:
* The prices are a lot higher there than anywhere else
* They don't remember my payment information. I would opt-in to this if it's a legal concern. It's so annoying every single time having to enter it in all over again. I'd do PayPal but they charge a fee these days.
* Their tar'd up download format sucks, and requires me doing a lot of re-naming and re-foldering things to get it to a sane format.
* They started removing some of the things I PAID FOR from my account. Not cool. It's fine if you have to remove it from sale but removing it from my account should not be legal.
* Many popular tracks from otherwise not-so-popular albums are locked so you can't buy just that song, you need to buy the whole album
* If you've bought a few songs from an album, you don't get an appropriate discount if you later decide to buy the whole album - which some digital stores are good about.
Used CDs are dirt cheap. Local thrift stores here tend to price them at $1-$1.50 each. Of course, the dedicated "record" stores tend to be closer to $6-10, but they're more likely to have things other than thousands of country albums.
I have the most luck going to the artist websites or social media. They often have links to different storefronts to buy physical and digital copies. The majority are on Bandcamp, but larger groups also release on Amazon.
I got one that wasn't; the music CD was published by SONY JAPAN. Had to do some shenanigans to play it on a PC drive. Decided it was best to rip it just in case.
As someone approaching 50, the return of Vynil is quite strange feeling.
I now see record stores so full of Vynil that it feels like I timetraveled back to my teenage years when CDs started to being sold, alongside laser discs on a little store corner.
Most gets released as singles, and as far as I know, to only streaming platforms.
Analog hole.
It takes a bit of time, but if you really care about the music, it's worth it.
Note: I suspect that the streaming services watermark the songs. I have some from Apple Music that it refuses to sync over its cloud service. Doesn't bother me, though, because I primarily sync via wire.
Some artists sell them directly either from the site, or at their concerts, the German region I live on still has several stores, and so far I also managed to get several MP3 albuns.
I don't use streaming platforms other than being aware of new musicians in YouTube, which I eventually buy their albums.
iTunes and Amazon have pretty much every song you'd want to buy.
Nope. Not even remotely. Only if your taste in music is very narrow.
Just this weekend I tried to buy some Christmas songs that were popular and common on the radio in the 80's. I could only find about half of them on Amazon or Apple Music.
Most had some version available, but not the canonical one I grew up with. Some didn't exist at all.
They even think they can exert rights over used album sales. As one example, pretty much all recordings that have rights attributed to an artist named Al Reed, who died in 1990, are blocked for sale on Discogs. Not just his own recordings, pretty much anything he has writing credit for. https://www.discogs.com/artist/623314-Al-Reed
>The volume of music available for an average person anywhere in the world to purchase today is many orders of magnitude greater than any era in the past.
You are 100% correct. But not for the reasons you imply. Music recording is just barely 120 years old, and mass market music media sales are, perhaps 75-80 years old.
And since many of those recordings are still around, with more music being recorded every year, it's no wonder there's more music available now than there ever has been.
That said, Sturgeon's Law[0] applies to music as well as everything else.
Additionally, there's no way to buy the Dolby Atmos mixes of most albums yet. Spatial sound mixes might actually have a chance at going mainstream, but you'll have to pay for these subscription services to access them.
