[derefr]

> Purchasing the right to see a movie, listen to a song, on a service, will never be the same as holding a physical copy.

I'm pretty sure you could design a SaaS offering in two parts: one that sells you a digital copy of a thing as a product (rather than a license), for delivery to a digital storage locker; and then, the other, a digital storage locker.

Oddly enough, Apple already has a digital storage locker, called iCloud Music Library. It's where your uploaded songs go when you use iTunes Match and the song doesn't actually match any entry in the Apple Music library.

If iCloud Music Library were properly designed (it's not), your purchased, matched, and uploaded songs would all be available permanently through iCloud Music Library in its capacity as a digital storage locker, whether or not they're still available through Apple Music. The licence-holders wouldn't be able to do anything about this: this isn't Apple broadcasting a song, this is Apple acting as the moral equivalent of bank, offering a safe-deposit box service, where you hold a box into which you've put a USB stick containing the song you bought from them.

Sadly, the synergy between Apple Music and iCloud Music Library is actually exactly the opposite of what anyone would want: when an artist's license agreement with Apple Music expires and their tracks are purged from the system, Apple will actually delete not just your purchased licenses from your iCloud Music Library; and not just the licenses of Apple Music tracks that fingerprint-matched local copies you had; but even your uploaded (!) copies of songs by a given artist that didn't match any Apple Music license, but just happened to have ID3 information corresponding to the artist whose rights were expiring. (In that case, the tracks still appear as entries in the iCloud Music Library list, but they're under a permanent "waiting" status, because their backing storage has been removed. There are many support threads about this issue, none with answers—well, that's what's going on.)

[ksec]

Do you have any idea why this "Digital Locker" features is not implanted worldwide?

The cost of Storage is dropping, Network Bandwidth is cheap for the likes of Apple which has connection to every major ISP worldwide. ( As well as their iPhone agreement with Mobile Carriers )

It was only few months ago I started hating the "streaming" model. When few of my artists's album suddenly disappeared from the listing of Apple Music. I started thinking may be buying them would be better in the first place. Now you are telling me even buying music could also means they would somehow disappeared?

Am I suppose to buy CD Now?

[thaumasiotes]

Amazon used to offer this in their Amazon Music offering, but they recently shut down the ability to store arbitrary files that you uploaded yourself. If you had any self-uploaded files in your library, they were purged.

It's difficult to understand this move from a customer service perspective. Does anyone know what's going on?

[derefr]

Amazon Drive used to offer unlimited file storage. They stopped because people from https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ were uploading their 100TB video library.

Now there's an arbitrary-file storage limit, and while Amazon Drive still offers unlimited photo storage, this proviso exists in the features page:

> If you are a Prime member, in addition to the list above, you can also store unlimited photos at no additional charge. However, the Amazon Photos unlimited photo benefit only applies to files recognized as photos. If a photo is encrypted, and Amazon Drive is unable to identify it as a photo, the file will count toward your storage limit. Videos also count toward your storage limit.

This is because, to get around the imposed limits, the data hoarders attempted to use a storage client that would chunk their large arbitrary files (probably pirated videos and game ISOs) into many smaller files that appeared to be collections of photos. The "photos" created by the chunking client were just arbitrary data with a .jpg extension, so scanning for "is this file of a valid image container format" was enough to thwart them. But, even if the data hoarders tried harder and made a new version of the chunking client which encoded their files as e.g. valid PNGs, 1. that's have really high bandwidth overhead, and 2. it'd still be pretty simple on Amazon's part to use more advanced ML to detect whether a given valid image is actually "a photo", or is just compressed binary data. So the data hoarders stopped while they were ahead.

I would guess that Amazon Music restricted their offering because of the data hoarders as well—unlike with photos, it's impossible to say whether arbitrary binary data constitutes "music" as long as it's stored as a stream in a valid media container file-format. It would have been fairly easy to create a new version of the data hoarders' chunking client that stored its arbitrary files as valid .flac containers. So Amazon just applied a policy solution instead.

[cjmoran]

Do you know whether Google Play Music's upload feature works in the same way?

[daeken]

Google Play Music actually keeps your files, rather than doing any kind of finger printing, as far as I can tell.